Biographical Notes

He studied piano, flute and music theory (1965-73) in Art School in Jihlava, continued with flute, pipe organ, music theory and composition at the Brno Conservatory (1973-79). He finished his studies cum laude by performing J. Zimmer's Concerto, J. S. Bach's Passacaglia C minor on pipe organ and writing dissertation work "Electronics & Sound".
1975-79 he has been studying composition privately with Alois Pinos, 1979-86 with the same professor at JAMU - Janacek's Academy of Music in Brno.
In 1982 during this study he got information about the rare possibility in those uneasy times behind iron curtain to take part in a Summer Composition Master Class at Academia Chigiana in Sienna, Italy, with Franco Donatoni - scholarships were offered by Italian Ministry of Education. To his big surprise he was selected by Czech authorities as an excellent student - rather unusual in those times when political activity was more important then gift, knowledge and ability. He or his parents didn't cooperate in any sense with official establishment (usual way how to show loyality was to be a member of Communist Party, they weren't). It was his the only journey to the West until 1994 (when his extensive travelling as Yamaha Product Specialist started). But expectations were not fulfilled - so after two days he stopped to visit the lessons finding that class was targeted to the music amateurs, beginners and rich diletants. Small scholarship allowed him to be only a passive visitor so there was no chance to be in a direct contact to Mr. Donatoni as teaching was done by his assistents. Daniel then spent two beautiful months in Tuscany for culture and language study, making some money playing flute on the streets of Sienna, Florence and other cities he visited, and returned to the grey zone of Czechoslovakian totality of "real socialism" with traces of Italian sun on the skin and in the mind. Since this visit he hadn't visited "bellissima Italia" again but he hopes to return one day...
He finished Academy study cum laude with his "Concerto for synthesizers, computer and large orchestra" (25'), he performed solo part himself) and thesis "Electronics & Music" (over 200 pages - later used as a base material for his expert books).
1999 he finished a postgradual study of "Theory of music composition" at JAMU and obtained Ph.D. He started another Ph.D. study at Department of Musicology of Masaryk University Brno (planned thesis "Chromaticism in European Music 1000-2000") but study was not finished because of moving to Japan.

Composition
Daniel Forro started to compose music in the age of 10, has been regularly composing since his 14 and has created more thousand works in the most different music genres (right now he tries to figure out the exact number) - he can write music in any style. He writes autonome New Music, where he often combines acoustic and electronic instruments. In each work he tries to use different principles and ideas, very often based on extra-musical material, complex mathematical structures or totally opposite on improvisation. He considers polystylistic electro-acoustic, computer and microtonal music to be his main stream - not always and necessarily experimental but very often it's so. Since 1985 he has been a pioneer in the use of MIDI and computers in the New music in former Czechoslovakia.
He wrote chansons, theatre, cabaret, pop, rock, folk, jazz and other songs (over 550 pieces), jazz, pop, rock and Latin works. He did a pretty great deal of functional music - 19 musicals and over 200 items of incidental music for theatre and ballet performances, TV and radio artistic or documentary programs, film, video, sports, groups of historical dancing and fencing, happenings and many other. Each item consists usually from many musical sequences, so real number of works is much higher. He has authored Brno municipal fanfares. He is able to write music in the style of composers of the past centuries as well as jazz, rock, pop, Latin, ethnic, fusion, microtonal, electronic, minimal and other music. He believes that only a composer of such wide and deep knowledge and ability deserves to be called "composer". He is both experimental and synthetic type of composer - on one side he did extremely experimental and unusual music, on the other side he is able to write quite eclectically in historical or ethnical styles.