FAMOUS CROATS 2010 - IVAN MATETIĆ RONJGOV

IVAN MATETIĆ RONJGOV Croatian composer, melograph and music educator Ivan Matetić Ronjgov was born 10 April 1880 in a small village of Ronjgi (comunity Viškovo), according to which to his family name the attachment Ronjgov has been added. He finished Teacher Training College in Koper, where he acquired his first music knowledge and after formal schooling, in the period between 1899 and1912 he taught in many Istiran villages, and later, till 1919, in Opatija. Though already skilled in composition and in choir conducting, it is only in his mature age that he will acquire professional education at the Music Academy in Zagreb, where he graduates in 1922 in the class of Franjo Dugan, the older. After three years spent at the Sušak Gymnasium as a teacher in singing, he returns back to Zagreb in 1925 and becomes a secretary at the Music Academy. From 1938, when he retires, till 1945 he lives in Belgrade but after the end of the war he returns first to Zagreb and in 1946 to his Rijeka. There he works for some time as a part-time teacher at Music School, today bearing his name. Though already in advanced age, he often pays visits to Istrian, costal and island villages, writes down, listens, analyses and diligently composes music. After a shorter period of hard illness he dies in a hospital in Lovran on 27 June 1960. Ivan Matetić dedicated a quarter of a century to intensive collecting, writing down and analysing of the Istrian and costal folk music. Specific in its difference from artistic tradition and from known tempered and non-tempered tone systems, Istrian-costal folk music is based on the specific half-tone system, for the first time theoretically described, analysed, and written down as „Istrian scale“, just by Matetić. In 1925 in the journal of St. Cecily he published his works „On Istrian Scale“ and „On Writing Down Istrian Chants“ and one year later also a treatise „More on Writing Down Istrian Chants», in which he elaborates a thesis on two basic types of Istrian folk melodies and proposes two possible harmonisations of Istrian scale. However, his melographic and etnomusicologic work helped him –apart from preserving folk music tradition – also in his other goal, i.e. in incorporating folk music into artistic music corpus either through citing or elaborating it or through composing based on the resulting half-tone system. As composer, Matetić presented himself to wider public only in 1933, in his 53rd year, by his first grand composition Ćaće moj (My Father) for the mixed choir. Apart from numerous, relatively short works for different vocal groups but mostly for the mixed choir, following great works deserve to be mentioned: Galijotova pesan (Song by a galley-rower,1940 – Text by Vladimir Nazor), Malo mantinjade v Rike na palade (1951 – folk text), Mantinjada domaćemu kraju (1954 – Text by Daša Kabalin), Naš kanat je lip (Our chant is beautiful, 1956 – Text by Ljubo Brgić) and Na mamin grobak (On mother’ s grave ,1959 – own Text). Nina Čalopek