Vasil S. Tole

He received his Diploma in Composition at the Music Faculty of the Acandey of Arts, Tirana, in 1987, after studying with Professor Kosma Lara, and after spending three years as Artistic Director of the House of Culture in Përmet, the town of his birth, in 1991 he was appointed lecturer in Albanian Folk Musicaa the Music Faculty of the Academy of Arts, and subsequently lecturer in Composition. In 1994 he successfully defended his doctoral thesis in ethnomusicology on “The Structure and Semantics of Southern Albanian Folk Music”. In 1994-1995 he pursued post-university studies in composition under Professor Wolfgang Hufschmidt at the Folkwang Hochschule, Essen, Germany, and in 1996 he pursued postdoctoral studies at the Musicology Department of University of Athens, Greece. In 2000 he became an Associate Professor, and in 2004 full Professor.
An active leading figure in the younger generation of Albanian composers, Vasil S. Tole is distinguished by his position as the intitiator of new compositional techniques, and as one of the most resolute advocates of the concept of restructuring musical; materials from Albanian folklore to locate an identity and innovations in contemporary music. He is also extensively engaged in scholarship and advocacy, as well as being a participant in many festivals, conferences and seminars on music in Albania, Greece, Italy, Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Bulgaria, etc. He has supplied materials for Albanian artistic and scholarly newpapers and journals, and for Albanian Radio and Television; is the author of dozens of articles and monographs on music, and has received a number of national and international awards, including the Dimitris Mitropoulos prize for composition, for his opera Eumenidet, Athens 2001. From the 1990s onwards, he and his colleagues at the Academy of Arts have been responsible for the foundation of several significant musical organisations, including the Albanian New Music Association (1993), the Albanian Section of the RILM Abstracts of Music Literature, New York (1995), and the Albanian Section of the CIOFF (1966). Since 1995 he has been the Secretary of the Albanian Music Council, a member of the UNESCO International Music Council, Paris, and a member of SEM, USA; Gema, Germany, etc. From 1997 to 1999 he was Director of the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Tirana. In 2005, in the capacity of expert in ethnomusicology, he prepared the dossier on Albanian folk iso-polyphony, proclaimed as a “Masterpiece of the Oral Heritage of Mankind”. Since 2001-2007 he has been the Director of the Cultural Heritage Administration at the Ministry of Tourism, Culture, Youth and Sports. He become as a member of the Academy of Sciences of Albania in 2008.

www.vasiltole.com
www.isopolifonia.com