Francis Travis

Francis Travis was an American-born Swiss conductor and musicologist who was born in 1921 in Detroit. He earned a doctorate in musicology from the University of Zurich and was a pupil and assistant to the conductor Hermann Scherchen. Travis served as the opera director at the Basler Theater and the Theater Trier and was a regular guest conductor at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam. He collaborated with more than 80 orchestras internationally and was a prominent proponent of contemporary music, serving as the president of the Swiss section of the International Society for Contemporary Music from 1974 to 1978. Between 1965 and 1990, he was a professor of orchestral conducting at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. Travis later lived in Tokyo between 1990 and 1995, where he taught at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and performed with various Japanese ensembles. His recordings include the album Suite algérienne La princesse jaune (2000) and the work “Requiem” by György Ligeti, which was featured in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Travis died in 2017 in Munich.