Karel Husa (born August 7, 1921 in Prague) is a Czech-born classical composer. He learned to play the violin and the piano in early childhood and, after passing his final examination at high school, he enrolled in the Prague Conservatoire in 1939 where he studied in a class of Jaroslav Ridky, a Czech composer with traditional leanings, and attended courses in conducting led by Metod Dolezil and Pavel Dedecek. After the end of the Second World War Husa was admitted to the graduate school of the Prague Conservatoire, where he attended courses led by Jaroslav Ridky and graduated in 1947. At the same time, he decided to continue his studies of composition and conducting in Paris. In 1947 he studied with Arthur Honegger and Nadia Boulanger. He studied conducting with Jean Fournet, Eugene Bigot and Andre Cluytens. After finishing his courses in conducting at Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris and at Conservatoire de Musique de Paris he embarked on a career during which he has conducted the world's leading orchestras and participated in many major projects. He divided his time between composing and conducting, taking an ever more active part in Parisian and international musical life. His First Quartet marked a big step on the composer's path to the realm of international music: the Quartet received the 1950 Lili Boulanger Prize and the 1951 award at the music festival in Bilthoven in the Netherlands. It has since also been performed on many other occasions, eg., at the festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music in Brussels (1950), festivals in Salzburg (1950), Darmstadt (1951), and the Netherlands (1952) as well as at various concerts in Germany, France, Sweden, England, Switzerland, Australia and the United States. Other compositions written by Karel Husa during his stay in Paris include Divertimento for String Orchestra, Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, Evocations de Slovaquie, Musique diamateurs, Portrait for String Orchestra, First Symphony, First Sonata for Piano, and Second String Quartet. Throughout this period, the composer's underlying preoccupation and interest was style, which was primarily influenced by Vitezslav Novak, Janacek, Bartok and Stravinsky. He is probably best known for his Music for Prague 1968, a work in memory of the 1968 Soviet bloc invasion of Czechoslovakia. His String Quartet No. 3 won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. He was a professor at Cornell University from 1954 until 1992, teaching students such as David S. Sampson, and still resides in Ithaca, New York.

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