Ruben Radica

Ruben Radica (19 May 1931 – 28 July 2021) was a Croatian composer.

Biography He was born in Split, Yugoslavia, and acquired a music grounding from his grandfather, the composer Josip Hatze. At the Zagreb Academy he graduated from the conducting class of Slavko Zlatić (1957) and from the composition class of Milko Kelemen (1958). In addition he attended classes in Siena, Paris and Darmstadt, given by Vito Frazzi, René Leibowitz, Olivier Messiaen, György Ligeti, Pierre Boulez and Henri Pousseur.

Career Radica taught at the Sarajevo Music Academy from 1959 to 1963, and then joined the faculty of the Zagreb Academy of music, lecturing in musical theory.

As a composer, Radica's early style was essentially neo-classical; in the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Nikša Gligo instances the compositions in Četiri dramatska epigrama (Four Dramatic Epigrams, 1959), and the Concerto abbreviato (1960). Gligo comments that some of Radica's later works, with a focus on the relation between speech patterns and "motivic musical ideas", have a style reminiscent of Janáček and early Stravinsky.