The composer Arnost Parsch began his formal training as a composer at a relatively late age. Originally economist by profession, he was 27 years old when he began to study composition at the Janacek Academy of Arts in Brno. However, he had already acquired a good grounding in music theory and the fundamentals of composition, partly by studying 20th century music scores on his own and partly through private lessons with Jaromir Podesva and Miloslav Istvan. His attention was caught early by the post-Webern development of European music. One year after graduation from the Janacek Academy he left his original profession to become secretary of the Brno regional section of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers and Concert Artists. In 1977 he became Secretary and Head of Secretariat of the Brno International Music Festival. Until recently he had been also teaching as a professor of the Janacek Academy. In the course of his studies of composition he was testing serial, dodecaphonic, aleatoric and timbre techniques in chamber compositions, sought inspiration in graphic scores and sculpture (Trasposizioni I, II, III). His liking for cybernetics and electro-acoustic instruments led him to electroacoustic studios of Czechoslovak Radio in Brno and Plzen, where he carried out a series of his electroacoustic and concrete music projects. At the turn of the sixties he participated, within a team of composers from Brno, in the creation of several experimental collective compositions. He has also co-operated with his colleague and friend M. Stedron, a composer and musicologist, in a number of original projects of non-traditional compositions. Distinct leaning towards musical folklore has been a new element in Parsch's creation since the mid-seventies. Moravian folk music intonations appeared already in third movement of Second String Quartet dedicated to the memory of P. Neruda, and in the subsequent composition called "The Bird Flew Up Above the Clouds" Parsch developed his own variation technique, making use of dozens variants of a Moravian-Slovak folk song in a very effective concertante style composition. Gradually he has been abandoning direct quotations of folk resources and, drawing from the oldest sources of Moravian folk song, he used modal techniques in his own way. This orientation continued to permeat Parsch's instrumental, orchestral and vocal creation until recently.