Ivan Vincze is a musician, composer and poet, who originally comes from Slovakia. He studied in Bratislava at the State Conservatory and later at the local VSMU – Music Academy. While touring extensively in Scandinavia with the National Folk Art Ensemble Lùcnica he decided to stay in Denmark and carried on his studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. In 1958 he became a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Würzburg. Later he worked as viola player in Graz Philharmonic Orchestra for several years.
After 1960 he became interested in composing and wrote several small chamber music pieces with short durations. He returned to Scandinavia and worked in orchestras in Göteborg, Copenhagen and Malmö. In 1981 he introduced a new side subject, “music orientation”, at a technical school in Denmark.
In the Autumn of 1982 he became a member of GIM – Group for Intuitive music. It was founded in 1974 and specialises in music notated with texts and/or graphics. Here, his view of music changed radically. As a member of GIM he met Karlheinz Stockhausen for the first time in 1983, who had provided GIM with its fundamental repertoire with his two collections notated with text: Aus den Sieben Tagen (From the Seven Days) and Für kommende Zeiten (For Times to Come). Following an invitation from Dieter Schnebel Ivan Vincze took part in composition courses for experimental music at the HdK – Hochschule der Künste in Berlin in 1987. His compositional priorities were now experimenting and creating music out of collective action, which could contribute to a higher form of culture. GIM and its members appeared as authors and interview subjects in publications by Dansk Musik Tidsskrift, ringgespräch über gruppenimprovisation and Musik Texte. These articles dealt with the group and the significance of inuitive music.
Several more groups for intuitive music were formed by Vincze: Bèla Hamvas Group for Intuitive Music (1995), United Dream of Nights (together with Jànos Vetö, CD released in 1998), The Intuitive Trio (2002) and IMA – International Music Association (2003). His works were also performed by Global All Stars in Copenhagen from 2010.
In 2008, filmmaker Jenö Farkas produced a short film about Ivan Vincze called “Ivan Eugen Vincze – improvising-impulsive-intuitive” (Nomad Film, Copenhagen).
