Milko Kelemen

Croatian composer Milko Kelemen was born in Podravska Slatina, now in Croatia, on 30 March 1924. He studied in Zagreb with Stjepan Šulek, with Olivier Messiaen in Paris and Wolfgang Fortner in Freiburg.

In 1959, Kelemen founded an international contemporary music festival - the Zagreb Biennale - and was its president from 1961 until 1979. He also worked at the Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich.

He was a professor in Düsseldorf at the Robert Schumann Institute, 1970-73, and was Professor of Composition at the Stuttgart Academy of Music and the Performing Arts from 1973 until 1989.

Kelemen, who based his musical language on Jungian principles, believed in striving to make the 'complexity' of new music more transparent, using musical 'archetypes' - highly developed elements of the collective unconscious - which need not necessarily use complicated compositional techniques.

He lived in Stuttgart in Germany, where he died on 8 March 2018, aged ninety-three.