Composer / Software Developer (Venice, Italy)

Janusz Podrazik born in Poland, lives and works in London and Venice. Podrazik’s involvement in music has been wide-ranging and varied. In 1975 he enrolled to study composition at the Musik Konservatorium in Poland. The course of study was interrupted when in 1976 Podrazik left Poland for Frankfurt Germany. Soon he formed the group “Ominous Mirage” a free jazz ensemble performing Podrazik’s compositions, himself on saxophone. In the early ‘80 his musical collaboration included the establishing of the now famous “English Speaking Theatre” in Frankfurt.

1984 Podrazik moved to London and embarked on an extensive study of Schönberg’s Harmonielehre. In 1991 Podrazik has conducted research into Computer Music (a study relating to the applications of computing technology in music composition), which lead him on a journey of no return to computer programming and algorithmic composition.

“The first step was to understand the creative process and methodology well enough to reproduce it as an algorithm that provides the composer with an unlimited scope for structural manipulation and tools to generate a series of variants and transformations.”

This accumulated knowledge and dexterity has enabled Podrazik to writing compositions for contemporary classical music, scores for film and the theatre.

The outcome of Podrazik’s work is the MRAC Library (Music Research and Composition Library) software. Here the computer interacts with compositional thought and imagination and explores regions we do not know – “what we know is far less important than what we do not know”. In 1996 the software was available to the music research community and MRAC Library algorithms became part of Symbolic Composer a composition software written in Common Lisp language, developed by Peter Stone. Since 2006 MRAC Library has added over 250 new algorithms to Symbolic Composer.

“The main focus of the MRAC Library is to give the contemporary composer support for the almost impossible tasks in composing music today – where there are no rules and the limit is your own imagination as well as the processing power of the CPU. In the world of the infinite and random possibilities the library – especially for a creative and daring mind – tries to build some kind of order to the world for the contemporary composer and thinker and maybe even help to picture her/his own language of composition.”