• 1953 – 1958

    the Conservatory in Žilina (violoncello, accordion and piano)

  • 1958 – 1960

    studies of composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava (Alexander Moyzes and Ján Cikker)

  • 1962 – 1965

    Panstwowa Wysza Szkola Muzyczna in Katowice in Poland, composition – Bolesław Szabelski and external consultation at Witold Lutoslawski's

  • 1965 – 1968

    the head of a music programme of the Slovak Radio in Košice

  • 1968 – 1977

    the director of programming at the Slovak Television in Bratislava

  • 1977 – 1988

    the director of programming at SĽUK

  • 1988 – 1991

    a freelance artist

  • 1990 – 1995

    the Chairman of the Club of Slovak Composers

  • 1991 – 1995

    an associate professor at the Faculty of Education in Nitra

"The originality of Salva’s musical language consists in a synthesis of the most archaic models of Slovak folk music with the most avantgarde compositional technologies. For him, the starting point of the composition is a modal melody subordinated to the contrapuntal relationships. His metre is very flexible: frequently there are polyrhythmic and polymetric passages, which he combines with the Lutosławski principle of limited aleatoric. Frequently the human voice (singing or reciting) is central to the compositional activity. Overall, Salva’s poetics took shape under the influence of the Polish school, but his compositional expression is supremely individual. The essential embodiment of Salva’s poetics is the ballad, an emotionally charged composition synthesising folk inspirations and techniques of the European avantgarde. The core of Salva’s work is in chamber, concert and orchestral compositions, but he is also the author of the first Slovak TV opera (Margita and the Madwoman) and the first radio opera (Weeping), whose polyphonic surfaces are composed exclusively by electroacoustic means: by multiplication of the lines of two human voices."


(GODÁROVÁ, Katarína: Tadeáš Salva. In: A Hundred Slovak Composers. Eds. Marián Jurík, Peter Zagar. Bratislava : National Music Centre Slovakia, 1998, p. 238.)

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