Miscellaneous
Anton Bruckner was born in the village of Ansfelden, in Upper Austria, where his father was the local schoolmaster and verger in the village church. After his father’s death, Bruckner’s mother took the twelve year old to the great monastery of St. Florian, some twelve kilometres away, where he was admitted to the boy’s choir. Here he would receive a thorough training not only as an assistant schoolmaster but most importantly as a musician. The Brucknertage at St. Florian take place in the very monastery where Bruckner spent a substantial part of his life and where he is buried. The monastery was a safe place to him, a spiritual home; he would often return to St. Florian to improvise on the organs in the Basilica and to work on his compositions in peace. The Brucknertage were initiated by Dr. Klaus Laczika, a doctor and himself a child of the region. The artistic director is Matthias Giesen, an accomplished organist and conductor who is musical director of the basilica and, like Bruckner before him, leader of the children’s choir. Apart from his profound love for and knowledge of Bruckner’s music, Dr. Laczika has strong ideas about the relationship between music and medicine. In his own practice in Vienna he often uses music in therapy, basing his work on the idea that the natural rhythms of classical music — as opposed to those of computerised music — match, on a fundamental level, the rhythms of the human body. Bruckner’s almost obsessive preference for strict numerical order corresponds closely with this idea.