Karel Goeyvaerts Pour Que Les Fruits Mûrissent Cet Été / Op Acht Paarden Wedden

Karel Goeyvaerts was born in Antwerp in 1923.
After having received a humanistic education in Antwerp, he took courses at
the Lemmens Institute in Malines. From 1943 until 1947 he studied at the Royal
Flemish Conservatoire of Antwerp. From 1947 until 1950 he studied composition
with Darius Milhaud, music analysis with Olivier Messiaen and was in addition the
pupil of Maurice Martenot at the “Conservatoire
National” in Paris. In 1949 he was awarded the 2nd Prize for Composition and the
Lili Boulanger Prize at the same Conservatoire. He obtained the Halphen Prize in
1950.
During the winter of 1950-51, he wrote the “Sonata for two pianos”. Because of
its decisive and total stylistic novelty he designated this work as “Composition
No 1”, thus rejecting all his former work. With this sonata he created a structural
synthesis of the dodecaphonic system of Anton Webern and the teachings of
Olivier Messiaen and laid the foundations for generalized “punctual” serialism. He
demonstrated the application of this technique on the electronic medium in his
compositions Nrs. 4, 5 and 7. During the period 1951-1956, he influenced directly
through personal contact and intensive correspondence the musical creativity of
Karlheinz Stockhausen, whom he met during the summer-courses of 1951 in
Darmstadt. In 1953, Goeyvaerts and Stockhausen produced the first electronic
music in the studio of the NWDR in Cologne.
In 1 970 th e BRT app oin ted h im as pr oducer at th e “Institute of Psychoacoustics
and Electronic Music” (IPEM) in Ghent. Since 1974 he is in charge of the New Music
productions for BRT-3 in Brussels. Karel Goeyvaerts received several awards,
such as the Koopal Prize in 1967 and the Visser-Neerlandia Prize in 1969. He
also was given commissions by the BRT, the Festiv al o f Fland ers and the NOS
(Nede r- lan ds e Omroepstichting). His works have been performed in several
European countries, in Canada, the United States, Japan and at the festivals of the
“International Society for Contemporary Music” (ISCM) Brussels 1950, Oslo 1953,
Graz 1972 and Bonn 1977.