The French composer Claude Ballif, the prominent figure of French music after World War II, died on July 24. He was born in Paris in 1924.

This prolific and indefatigable creator is the inventor of the Metatonality - a fusion of diatonic scales with the chromatic one, which form an 11-element metatonal scale.

However, this aesthetic principle, this reaction on rigors of the Schönberg's doctrine, is not always applied in his works, which reveal a huge hermetic, abstract poetry with some expressive dramatic, exclamatory accents.

Like Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis, Ballif was a disciple of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatoire.

He was lecturer at French institutes in Hamburg and Berlin, professor of music pedagogy at the Conservatoire de Reims before he was appointed professor of composition at Conservatoire national supérier de musique in Paris.

He was "commander of the national order of merit" and "commander of arts and letters". Ballif left to posterity five sonatas and other piano works, compositions for two, three, four, five and seven instruments, an opera, three cantatas, four large orchestral works as well as some theoretic works including his doctorate dissertation on metatonality.

He had three publishers in Paris. His first Sonata for piano was edited in Germany. His first string quartet won the first prize at the International Composition Contest in Geneva. In 1986, the Festival Estival de Paris (Paris Summer Festival) presented most of his productions, including his unique opera, to the very large cosmopolitan audience. All concerts were recorded for Radio France. Unfortunately, Ballif and his works are totally unknown in Malta.

I recorded Ballif's first sonata in Holland and played it at a very well attended recital in Jakarta, Indonesia. Jakarta's critic, Gus Kairupan, who is also professor at Columbia University in New York, stated: "Poetic and dramatic elements formed the idea of Claude Ballif's Sonata op.18 which emphasised the contrasts of the mandatory three-part sonata rather than adhering to the structure of the elements. Freedom marked the arrangement of building blocks, freedom certainly, but not in a haphazard manner, not liberty to exploit, but liberty to create".