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Ruminations-Bassoon Works of Eugene Bozza on CD

Eugène Joseph Bozza was a prolific French composer who was active for the majority of the 20th century. Although Bozza wrote vocal music, stage works, ballets, and orchestral works, he is best known for his wind chamber music and wind instrument solo works. The printed catalog of Bozza's works by Alphonse Leduc (the major publisher of Bozza's compositions) lists 228 titles and 167 of these are for wind instrument solos or chamber groups. Many of his instrumental solos were used at the Conservatoire de Paris as examination pieces, testing students' performance at the close of each semester. Bozza's compositional style varies with each work, and he writes both technically demanding passages along with beautiful, lyrical melodies. He frequently uses recurring thematic material, both within an individual piece as well as between separate works. Seth Brodsky, Professor of Music and the Humanities at the University of Chicago, states: The marvelously capable composer Eugène Bozza is one of those countless creatures in the forest of modern music who never made it into the mitten. A prodigious talent coming of artistic age in Paris between the wars, Bozza lived through virtually the entire century, and was a coeval of every musical -ism imaginable (expressionism, futurism, objectivism, minimalism, maximalist). But none of them stuck to him, and he appears to have been quite fine with that. He composed music with no stories attached, immaculately crafted and attentive to the playing idioms of all instruments. He wrote music primarily for the players, and left the historical mitten largely alone.