Pelēcis Georgs Pelēcis

Georgs Pelēcis (also Georges Pélétsis; born 18 June 1947) is a Latvian composer and musicologist.

Georgs Pelecis is one of the most knowledgeable musical scholars in Latvia, especially in the fields of history and theory of counterpoint. The composer was born in Riga on June 18th 1947. He graduated from the Piotr Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Moscow in Aram Khachaturjan’s composition class in 1970, and in 1977 he finished the music theory post-graduate course with Vladimir Protopopov. As of 1970, he has been a lecturer in the Music Theory Department at the then Latvian State Conservatory, now the Latvian Academy of Music. In 1990 he was elected to the position of professor. His main disciplines are counterpoint and fugue.

Georgs Pelecis’s work in the field of musicology is especially noteworthy. In 1991 he submitted his doctoral thesis on The Musical Forms of Jean de Ockenghem and the Traditions in the Low Countries Polyphonic School.

In the field of polyphony, he has contributed to more than 30 scientific works – both on the history of Western European music (Middle Ages, Renaissance, Baroque) and on the history of Latvian music – publications and international conferences in Riga, Moscow and Rome. His other main research subject, Palestrina’s Principles of Polyphony and Traditions of the Vocal Polyphonic Era (1990) is seen as a major contribution to the subject and was awarded a medal at the International Palestrina Centre of Rome in 1993. Georgs Pelecis was the first President of the Ancient Music Centre of Riga.

The composer has worked in a creative capacity at Oxford (1995, Corpus Christi College) and Cambridge (1997, Gonville and Caius College) Universities. Pelecis has also received compositional commissions from the United Kingdom. His symphonic music for the Roald Dahl story “Jack and the Beanstalk” was performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London. His works have been performed at the Alternativa festival in Moscow, and at the Lockenhaus festival in Austria. His concerto, Tomér (Nevertheless), was given a dance accompaniment by the ballet troupe Dance Alloy in Pittsburgh in 2000 under the direction of choreographer Mark Taylor.

The musical tonality of Georgs Pelecis seems to reflect an amazingly clear positive spirit. This very quality, whose genetic ancestry can be found partly in Renaissance and Baroque music and partly in the minimalist aesthetic, brings a spiritual strength to the composer’s creative output and brings to Latvian music a previously unknown fresh and pulsating activity. Of all the stylistic categorisations which the composer himself and musical critics have given to his works, the most precise would be “new consonant music”. Pelecis’s music, both naive and mysterious in style, also reveals his profound knowledge of the music of past cultures. 

Notable works include:

• Revelation, Concerto for counter-tenor, piano, and trumpet
• Nevertheless, Concerto for violin, piano, and strings
• Buena-Riga
• The Last Song
• Flowering Jasmine, Concerto for violin, vibraphone, and strings
• Jack and the Beanstalk, Music for the Roald Dahl fable for symphony orchestra and narrators
• Concertino bianco for piano and chamber orchestra