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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Frank Martin (15 September 1890 – 21 November 1974) was a Swiss composer, who lived a large part of his life in the Netherlands.
Born into a Huguenot family in the Eaux-Vives quarter of Geneva, the youngest of the ten children of a Calvinist pastor named Charles Martin, Frank Martin was improvising at the piano even before he started school. At the age of nine, despite having received no musical instruction, he wrote some complete songs. He attended a performance of Bach\'s St. Matthew Passion when he was 12 and was deeply affected.
Respecting his parents\' wishes, he studied mathematics and physics for two years at Geneva University, but all the time he was also working at his composition and studying the piano, composition and harmony with his first music teacher Joseph Lauber (1864–1953), a Geneva composer and by that time a leading light of the city\'s musical scene. In the 1920s, Martin worked closely for a time with Émile Jaques-Dalcroze from whom he learned much about rhythm and musical theory. Between 1918 and 1926 Martin lived successively in Zurich, Rome and Paris. Compositions of the period show him searching for an authentic musical voice of his own.
In 1926 he established the Chamber Music Society of Geneva which, for the next ten years, he conducted, as well as contributing on the clavichord and piano. During this period he was also teaching musical theory and improvisation at the Jaques-Dalcroze Institute, and chamber music at the Geneva Conservatory.
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