Death of the Honegger student Karel Husa
His Music for Prague 1968 is also popular with Swiss wind orchestras. Karel Husa, Pulitzer Prize winner and student of Arthur Honegger, has now died in the USA at the age of 95.
According to the Schott publishing house, Husa, who was born in 1921, studied composition and conducting at the Prague Conservatory from 1941 to 1945 and later at the Prague Academy of Music. In 1946, he received a five-year scholarship from the French government, which enabled him to continue his studies in Paris with Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger.
The new communist regime in Prague declared his passport invalid in 1949. An invitation enabled him to leave for the USA in 1954. There he taught composition at both Cornell University in New York and Ithaca College New York until 1992.
Husa has received worldwide recognition and numerous prizes for his compositional work. For example, his String Quartet No. 3 was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music and his Cello Concerto received the Grawemeyer Award. His Music for Prague 1968 became a standard work in the modern wind orchestra repertoire. In 1995, Husa was awarded the Czech Republic's highest order of merit and in 1998 received the Order of the City of Prague.
