Slovenská hudba, Vol. 50, No 1, p.9-20, 2024

A Completed Life Fulfilled with the Love of Knowledge and Musical Beauty
Ad Honorem Ladislav Burlas

Ladislav Burlas (3. 4.1927 – 11. 2. 2024) was a renowned Slovak musicologist and composer. From the very beginning of his career, he has been a scholar at the Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava (between 1951 and 1987); in the period of 1960 – 1973, he was the head of the institute. After the success of his books promoting his music-historical and ethnomethodological research he focused his attention on more in-depth study of the systematic disciplines of musicology. As a scholar he has written (authored and co-authored) 21 books and dozens (about 160) of musicological papers and studies. He wrote some fundamental and, for musicology, most beneficial works: Hudobná teória a súčasnosť (1978) [Music Theory and the Present Time], Slovenská hudobná moderna (1983) [Slovak Music Modernism], Pohľady na súčasnú slovenskú hudobnú kultúru (1987) [Views on Present-day Slovak Music Culture]. Towards the end of the 1990’s, Burlas narrowed down his focus on depicting the issues of music and pedagogy, and music and education. This resulted in the writing of university coursebooks Teória hudobnej pedagogiky (1997) [The Theory of Music Pedagogy] and Hudba – komunikatívny dynamizmus (1998) [Music – Communicative Dynamism].
He was a student of one of the founding fathers of Slovak national music (Mikuláš Schneider--Trnavský), and a composition student of a representative of the Slovak national modernism (Alexander Moyzes). In this way, he received the best possible private (in the hometown of Trnava), secondary (Conservatoire in Bratislava) and university music education that prepared him for a career of a composer (Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava where he has graduated in 1955). Among his most known and most often performed compositions are Svadobné spevy z Horehronia (1957) [Wedding Music of Horehronie], Metamorfózy krás [The Metamorphoses of the Beauty] for mixed choirs and solo violin (1964), vocal symphony Stretnúť človeka (1984) [To Meet a Man], etc. As “opus magnum” it is generally referred to Planctus (1968) for a string orchestra that was written as an artistic reaction to the 1968 military invasion of Czechoslovakia. Memories of those who came into contact with professor Burlas point to the humanistic dimension of his personality and his activities, which bear the mark of humanity, the fallible and the persuasive, the humble and the unbreakable approach to life. This is what makes the scientific, human and artistic life inspiring for future generations.