Leon Schidlowsky

Leon Schidlowsky (Hebrew: ליאון שידלובסקי; born 21 July 1931 in Santiago de Chile) is a Chilean-Israeli composer and painter. He has written music for orchestra, chamber ensemble, choir, and instruments including the piano, violin, cello, flute, mandolin, guitar, harp, organ, as well as about sixty-five pieces of music with graphic notation. His compositions have been performed in numerous countries with different orchestras under conductors such as Aldo Ceccato, Errico Fresis, Clytus Gottwald, Juan Pablo Izquierdo, Erhard Karkoschka, Herbert Kegel, Lukas Foss, Zubin Mehta, Hermann Scherchen, and Ingo Schulz. The scores of his graphic music have been shown in various exhibitions linked to concerts, such as in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Kunsthaus Hamburg, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, and the Stadtgalerie Saarbrücken.

Schidlowsky pursued his secondary studies at the Instituto Nacional de Chile in Santiago from 1940–47 and studied the piano with Roberto Duncker at the Conservatorio Nacional de Chile in Santiago from 1942-48. He later studied composition with Juan Allende-Blin and Fré Focke, as well as philosophy and psychology at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago from 1948-51. He completed his studies in Germany at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie (later Hochschule für Musik Detmold) in Detmold, where he met his future wife Susanne, whom he married in 1953. They had five children (David, Elias, Judith, and twins Yuval and Noam).