Charles Camilleri passes away

In Charles Camilleri, who passed away this morning aged 77, Malta has lost a composer of international repute. John Funk, the artistic director of the Academy of Music Sciences in North America, writes about "the magical Mediterranean world of Charles Camilleri":

In 1977 Camilleri was appointed professor of composition at the Royal Consevatory of Music in Toronto, and also lectured at SUNY, Buffalo, where he met Carter, Feldman and Cage. His permanent return to Malta in 1983 came at a point in Camilleri’s life when he once again returned to the preoccupation of the Mediterranean soundscape. In his book Mediterranean Music, a dialogue with the philospher Peter Serracino Inglott, as well as in his Maltese operas, an oratorio, and the later symphonies and concertos, Camilleri’s organic nationlistic growth reaches maturity. In 1992 he was appointed first professor of music at the University of Malta, a position which he held until 1996.

Camilleri is an artist with an international reputation who has had his work performed by many of the world’s leading musicians on five continents. Three composers now make up the Mediterranean School, developed during the second half of the 20th century: the Italian, Giacinto Scelsi, the Greek, Iannis Xenakis and the Maltese, Charles Camilleri. As a child prodigy, Camilleri virtually taught himself to compose and now continues to compose prolifically, including many commissioned works.

In addition to being a prolific composer, pianist, professor, and author, Charles Camilleri is also a piano pedagogue. His keyboard works include two books of piano studies designed as an introduction to contemporary music, three volumes of Études, sets of Sonatinas (including arrangements of Gibbons for harpsichord), piano miniatures, piano cycles, dances, and a large output of organ music. Examples of the teaching literature available by Camilleri are Pieces for Anya for solo piano, Berceuse, and Out of School.

Here, the listener encounters a very distinctive sound-world that is quintessentially Mediterranean, tailored to the late elementary and early intermediate piano student. These accessible pieces contain: modal writing, folk settings, light dissonance and ornamentation, changes of Time Signatures, motivic writing, and expressive elements of articulation, rhythmic variation, etc...