Vojtěch Dlask is a Czech composer, dramaturge, publicist, pianist and pedagogue. He grew up in Prague. After two semesters of music theory at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, he left to Brno, where he studied composition with František Gregor Emmert in 2000-2005 and followed-up with doctoral study in 2005–2009 (dissertation Symbolism in Music, Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno, 2011, ISBN 978-80-7460-010-4). He completed composition internships in Lithuania (2003) and Estonia (2007). He lives alternately in Brno and the Jizera Mountains.
In Dlask's music, macaronisms in intonations and polyrhythmic invoices are common. In addition to artificial compositions, he is also the author of a number of sampled compositions, in which he approaches dance music, jazz, ambient music or musical collage or sound design.
"My music is not abstract: in the sense of a metaphor for fine art, I am an ornamentalist and I paint scenes - bodies in space and faces. My music is narrative; I transform genres: I don't believe too much in the predetermined polarities of high versus low or modern versus unmodern. Often even purely instrumental compositions have a hidden text set to music as a cantus firmus, while songs with singing are usually carried by a subversive relationship to the character of my music. Some compositions set several lyrics to music as a palimpsest, and this alternative then transforms the expression of the music. My compositions are not atonal, serial, spectral etc., they do not use gestural methods of composition such as indeterminate notation, conceptualism etc. - they are written in a closed form, with clearly defined themes and often polyrhythmic texture, more disturbed perhaps only by consistent asymmetry of shape and forms. I create mainly by the method of inner listening and by refining this voice with long retouches."
