Julien-François Zbinden

Julien-François Zbinden (b Rolle, canton of Vaud, 11 Nov 1917). Swiss composer and pianist. During and after his training as a primary school teacher (diploma 1938), Zbinden studied the piano with Emile Doosterd (1930–35), Gertude S.

Keller-Ching and Marie Panthès (1940–45). He began his professional career as an orchestral and jazz pianist (1938–47), and then joined the Lausanne studio of Radio Suisse Romande (RSR) as a pianist and sound engineer. In 1956 he became director of the music department of RSR, and was the chief assistant for music broadcasting there from 1965 to 1982. He was also president of the Swiss Composers' Union (1973–9), and of the Swiss composers' copyright association SUISA (1987–91).

As a composer he was initially self-taught, but in 1942 began three years of study with R. Gerber in Neuenburg (counterpoint and orchestration), culminating in the composition of his Suite brève en ut op.1, the harmony of which shows Ravel's influence. In Zbinden's subsequent compositions the influence of Stravinsky's neo-classical works is stronger, and jazz rhythms also leave their mark. Jazz sonatine for piano and Jazzific 59–16 for jazz band and string orchestra are explicitly concerned with the jazz tradition, but its influence is also perceptible in other works. His interest in the harmonic dimension, increasingly obvious from his Second Symphony onwards, has led him to retain a tonal idiom in his work; certain polytonal passages are related to the music of Honegger, whose humanistic ideas he shares and to which he refers in several works (the Second Symphony's slow movement and Hommage à Arthur Honegger op.68). His music only occasionally employs more modern techniques, such as an aleatory formal structure (Pianostinato) and – with satirical intent – 12-note technique (the fourth of the Proverbes en forme d'études). Awards he has won for his work as a composer include the Prix Henryk Wieniawski, Warsaw (1956), the Grand Prix de la Communauté Radiophonique des Programmes de Langue Française, Montreal (1963), and the Médaille d'Or of the city of Lausanne (1993).