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Zygmunt Krauze

Polish pianist and composer, born in Warsaw, 19 September 1938. A 1962 and 1964, respectively, graduate of the National Higher School of Music piano studies in the class of Maria Wilkomirska and of composition with Kazimierz Sikorski, Krauze continued his music education in Paris on a French Government scholarship as a student of Nadia Boulanger in 1966-1967. Since 1963 Krauze has been playing concerts as a pianist in Europe and the United States, performing mainly contemporary works. In 1967 he founded the Warsztat Muzyczny [Musical Workshop] ensemble, specializing in playing the most recent compositions and consisting of clarinetist Czeslaw Palkowski, trombonist Edward Borowiak, cellist Witold Galazka, and Krauze at the piano. The ensemble continued until 1988, gave a total of approximately 300 concerts and had more than 100 works composed for it by Polish and foreign composers. For many years Krauze was involved in teaching alongside composing, lecturing on composition and piano playing in a number of academic centers around the world. In 1970-71 he was a piano professor at the Cleveland State University, and in 1973-1974 stayed in Berlin at the invitation of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He was a lecturer at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm in 1975, the International Summer School of New Music in Darmstadt in 1976, Indiana University in Bloomington and University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1978, the Basel Academy of Music in 1979, Yale University in New Haven in 1982, International Summer School in Kazimierz Dolny and Keio University in Tokyo in 1986, Groznjan in Croatia in 1988, Rubin Academy of Music in Jerusalem in 1991, and in Osaka, at Kobe University, the National University in Seul, Yale University and Columbia University of New York in 1994. In 1982-1989 Krauze lectured in Paris, where he was appointed the artistic advisor at the Institut de Recherche de Coordination Acoustique Musique (IRCAM) at the invitation of Pierre Boulez in 1982 and ran weekly music programs in Radio France Musique in 1983-84. In 1986 Krauze co-produced a series of educational films entitled "The Making of Music" for the Polish Television, winning the award of the Chairman of the Polish Radio and Television in 1987, followed by a series of films on contemporary music, called "The Sound and Silence".