Ceunen, Felix

Felix Ceunen – Sechs Teile ‘ohne Worte’ (2010)

(Heusden, 13 maart 1955)

Composer and conductor Felix Ceunen spent formative years at the Royal Conservatories of Antwerp and Liège. His musical education there was comprehensive, including a first prize for bass tuba. For years he played in the Royal Belgian Navy Band, and today he plays an important role as coach, counsellor and jury member in the HaFaBra world.

As a composer Ceunen is to a large extent self-taught, but even so he took master classes with composers such as Jan Van Landeghem (Royal Conservatory Brussels), Clarence Mak (Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts) and Stefano Gervasoni (Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris). He composed about a hundred works, most of them for wind instruments, but also for piano, organ, strings, brass band and symphony orchestra. Furthermore he has also been writing light music under the pseudonym Phil Eastland.

In the French city of Mirecourt, a fountainhead of violin making, Ceunen familiarized himself in 2007 with the modern playing techniques on the violin, and this changed his composition style dramatically. With the work for violin Akhlys, written in that new idiom, he became finalist in the ISME-IVME 2nd International Composition Contest in Brussels. In 2009 he composed the orchestral work Lucius Vorenus & Titus Pullo, which was performed on 13 March 2010 by the orchestra of the University of Mary Washington from Fredericksburg (Virginia). In 2010 he was awarded in Antwerp the Jef Van Hoof Prize 2010 for Parcae, a work for violin solo, a score already published before in The Flemish Music Collection (Repertoire Explorer, nr. 560).

Recent works are, among others, Cadenza e vivace for solo violin (2011), which was performed various times both in Belgium and abroad; Gorcum for French horn and wind orchestra, which was premiered in 2013 in Stellenbosch by Sigrid Ceunen and Windworx, conducted by Rik Ghesquière; Nyali for cello and piano, performed at the Osmose Festival in Evere (2016) and Elogium for harp, performed at the The Future Blend Project Concert in Warwick.

Felix Ceunen composed Sechs Teile ‘ohne Worte’ for horn and piano in 2010. The piece was performed by the horn player Sigrid Ceunen and the pianist Pamela Kierman (to whom the work is dedicated) during a house concert in Pinelands (Cape Town).

Jan Dewilde
(Translation: Joris Duytschaever / Jasmien Dewilde)

This score was published in collaboration with the Study Centre for Flemish Music (www.svm.be).
www.felixceunen.be

Read Flemish preface > HERE