Petr Kotik
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Petr Kotik (surname originally Kotík) (b. January 27, 1942 in Prague) is a Czech composer and flutist living in New York City. He was born and educated in Europe but has lived in the United States since 1969. Kotik serves as Artistic Director of the New York City-based S.E.M. Ensemble, with which he also performs on flute.
Kotik studied flute at the Prague Conservatory, at the Academy of Music with František Čech, and at the Music Academy in Vienna with Hans Reznicek. From 1960 to 1963, he studied composition with Jan Rychlík in Prague, and from 1963 to 1966 at the Music Academy in Vienna with Karl Schieske, Hans Jelinek, and Frederich Cerha. In Prague, he founded and directed Musica Viva Pragensis (1961-64) and the QUAX Ensemble (1966-69). He came to the United States in 1969 to work at the Center for Creative and Performing Arts at the University at Buffalo.
Kotik's music is composed in the minimal vein, with works often being of long duration and featuring slow tempi and quiet dynamics. Though his works feature innumerable gradual, slight changes, giving them a seemingly static quality, his harmonies, however, are more complex than those employed by many other American minimal composers, and his musical process is not as apparent to the listener as, for example, in the works of Steve Reich or Philip Glass. Further, Kotik does not draw as heavily on jazz or rock in his works as do many of his American colleagues (though, like Steve Reich, he is quite interested in Medieval music and often integrates Medieval compositional techniques into his works). These qualities set Kotik's music apart from American minimal trends, giving his music a decidedly European character more similar in outlook to, for example, that of Hungarian minimalists such as Zoltán Jeney, László Sáry, or László Vidovszky.
Among Kotik's best known works is the six-hour opera Many Many Women (1976-78), based on a text by Gertrude Stein, for whose work, appropriately, Kotik has a special affinity.
Kotik has received composition grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (1997).
With the S.E.M. Ensemble (which he founded in 1970), Kotik has for many years actively promoted the work of other (mostly American) composers sharing a stylistic affinity with his own work, giving frequent performances as conductor and performer with the group as well as its larger version, the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble.
Kotik is also known for his realization of the complete musical works of Marcel Duchamp.
Recordings of Kotik's music have been released on the Labor and Ear-Rational labels.
