Composers' Prize Winners Concert Programme Booklet English

Composers’ Prize Winners’ Concert of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

Composers’ Prize Winners’ Concert of the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung organised by Bavarian Radio’s musica viva Friday, October 1, 2021 | Prinzregententheater Munich 6 and 8.30 pm Composers’ Prizes 2020 :

Samir Amarouch Catherine Lamb Francesca Verunelli Composers’ Prizes 2021:

Malte Giesen Mirela Ivičević Yair Klartag

The concert will be streamed live at evs-musikstiftung.ch and ensemble-modern.com.

BR-KLASSIK is recording the concert. It will be broadcasted on October 12, 2021 at 8.05 p.m. at BR KLASSIK.

Editorial Michael Roßnagl

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Supporting young musicians was a key consideration of the Founder Ernst von Siemens. To achieve this goal, the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation established the Composer Prizes in 1991. From the very beginning, the aim of the award was to provide young composers with the chance to pursue their vocation without the concern for its financing, whilst simultaneously bringing them to the attention of a wider audience. Given this background, it is a special pleasure for us to present to you this evening six young composers – the winners of this prize in 2020 and 2021 – in a ­two-part portrait concert organised by our long-standing partner, musica viva of the Bayerischer Rundfunk.

I wish you an exceptional and enjoyable concert evening, Yours

Michael Roßnagl Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation

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Program concert I

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Mirela Ivičević [*1980 ] Sweet Dreams [2019 ] for ensemble

Yair Klartag [*1985] Rationale [2021] for soprano and ensemble

Catherine Lamb [*1982] Prisma Interius V [2017] for synthesizer | harp, bass clarinet, wine glasses | strings

Samir Amarouch [*1991] Electronica-b minor crush [2020 ] for 21 musicians

Performers Einat Aronstein, soprano Ensemble Modern David Niemann, conductor

Program concert II

Malte Giesen [*1988 ] Massenprozession (2020 ) for chamber orchestra and 8 -channel electronics

Francesca Verunelli [*1979 ] wo.man sitting at the piano [2017/19 ] for flute and piano

Performers Dietmar Wiesner, Flute Ensemble Modern David Niemann, conductor

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Mirela Ivičević [*1980 ]

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Sweet Dreams [2019]

for ensemble ”The beginning, for me, always starts with experiences, the fascinating or shocking elements of reality. These are never silent images. There is almost always an aural aspect – spoken words or sounds of various kinds. For me, they are the raw material with which I create. They are processed compositionally.“ Mirela Ivičević

Music literature is overwhelmingly written from the male perspective.

Example of portrayals of the female world-view are few and far between. Getting personal requires courage. Female worlds of ex­ perience play a major role in Mirela Ivièević’s work. Questions of identity, queerness and otherness already permeate the pieces of the Dominosa series. In Sweet Dreams, the composer enters the intimate realm of her pregnancy. Ivièević’s views on the mysterious production of new life are reflected here in a thrilling soundscape.

Much research is done on what embryos perceive in the womb, what sounds are transmitted through the mother’s body. And then Ivièević reverses the question: she sets the sleeping phases of her unborn child to music and splits her own perceptual world in two: one for her own life and one for the dream world of the ­embryo.

From this introspective, multidimensional sound world emerge phases of high-emotion – moments of great tension, modelled on the embryo’s REM phases. Interspersed within this are phases of rest structured by a slow pulse – the heartbeat of the child. Unexpectedly and surprisingly, we quickly shift from one episode to the next: surreal images with dreamlike associations flash up. Ivièević doesn’t resort to typical uterine sounds. Nothing rushes here. ­Rather, something tense and mysterious permeates the composition.

The listener is invited into an alternative world of perception, as if on a voyage of discovery.

Shilla Strelka

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Ecstatic Soundworlds and the Politics of Privacy

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Is it possible for the senses to produce resonances amongst themselves? Is it possible to acoustically represent that which is re­ membered and experienced and: how much abstraction does such a translation need and how much can it tolerate if it is to lead us into the realm of the imagination? The composer Mirela Ivièević transforms sensual and emotional, as well as political and social impressions into haunting and suggestive works. She has no qualms with the processing of personal experiences, on the contrary – her œuvre and biography are closely intertwined. She writes herself into her pieces, staking her place. Ivièević is not concerned with a simple translation of her experiences. Her approach is much more emotional, sensual and immediate. She extends her experiences into a sound so as to become a discovery, an invention. At the same time, what is narrated always remains in limbo. In a critical ex­ amination of society, but also of her own emotional world, Ivièević enters into historical, intimate or semi-fictional realms. What ­preoccupies her are the micro- and macro-political questions. Many of her works revolve around self-empowerment she herself has experienced. They tell of relationships, of sexuality and pregnancy, but also of powerlessness, of war and destruction. They demand independence and freedom, a space free of ideologies and power dynamics. This occurs not only on a conceptual but also on an

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acoustic level. Dominant orders, hegemonic relationships, are suspect to Ivièević, no matter in which context. It is a matter of ­re­belling against them, of going against borders, taboos and fixed meanings. As a result, she is not a composer of shy notes. Her ­music roars, it rears up, it shrieks and falls away, it curses and moans.

Hyperactive structures and high densities run towards ecstatic ­outbursts, an acoustic inferno, a great stroke of liberation. Tense and anarchic, Ivièević’s compositions resemble rebellious acts.

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Reality reloaded

Inspired by film, theatre and opera, the composer creates – in her own words – “sonic fictions” that are located somewhere between the remembered and the imagined. In this surreal world, flickering between virtual and actual, the most diverse sounds and languages can coexist. Their otherness is given a sense of the serious and they thereby enter into a relationship with each other. Dichotomies are suspended. Collaging and sampling evidence of the real, acoustic impressions of contemporary society enables her to produce alternative realities in the hope that they will teach us something new. These realities – laced with arcs of tension and harsh contrasts – speak to a collective unconscious. They play with intensities and effects. Ivièević masters the mysterious and the secretive, as well as drawing us in to suspense and horror.

According to the composer, every sound carries its own context, its own cultural imprint; no sound is neutral. Ivièević thus wishes to release a transformative energy in her music. She deconstructs languages and removes sonic elements from their natural sur­ roundings in order to dramatically democratise them. It is a political move, a commitment to a heterogeneous, multi-perspectival world.

By using the most diverse sound generators, equalising contexts and quoting diverse popular music genres – from jazz to pop to noise, rock and film music – reality finds a counterpart in complexity.

Ultimately, it is an attempt to break out of art and into life.

Shilla Strelka

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18

  81

Fl.



  f

f

  

  f

 





pp

 



Cl.

 

  

 



Ob.

16

  

pp









    





    





mp sfz



Alto Sax.









Air sound, no pitch

 



mp sfz

pp



B. Cl.

 

f



mf

    

f



Air sound, no pitch

 



f

Hn.

Tbn.

Vib.

Xyl.



 

 



Hp.



  





mp

    







mp



  



mp



  



pp



 +   



mp







 3





  3

  



                      Pno.  



 



3



   









  

   



mf

        



Accord.

Vln.





    

gliss. gliss.

  

gliss. gliss.

  

mf



Vln.

  

mf



Vc.

 

gliss. gliss.

pp

gliss. gliss.

mf

  

gliss. gliss.

pp

mf

 

 

gliss. gliss.

pp

gliss. gliss.

 

gliss. gliss.

pp

  



  

pp

mf

 pp

gliss. gliss.

 

gliss. gliss.

  

mf

mf

 







Excerpt from Sweet Dreams (2019)





3

 

                 



                     3



pp

  

gliss. gliss.

 

gliss. gliss.

  

mf

gliss. gliss.

pp

  

mf

   

pp



gliss.



gliss.

mf



MSP   

    mf



gliss. gliss.

pp

mf



 

gliss.

gliss. gliss.

MSP

Cb.

 

3

mf

MSP



p





 















   









Vla.



    



3

with bottleneck



 

3



3

E. Gtr.

   

ppp

3



 

f

gliss.

                     

3

Air sound, no pitch

mp



                   

f







 





     

 Air sound, no pitch

mp sfz





C Tpt.

  

gliss.

  

gliss. gliss.

mf

gliss. gliss.

  

mf

gliss. gliss.

 

 

  84

Fl.

    



 



f



Cl.



B. Cl.



Alto Sax.

f





Ob.

Hn.

C Tpt.

Vib.

Xyl.





     pp



   



  









     

Pno.



E. Gtr.

Accord.

Vln.



 

 

 

 

 

  

Vln.

     

gliss.

pp



Vla.



gliss. gliss.



Vc.

gliss.

   







gliss.

  

ppp

  

mp

 



 

sfz

5

5

5

5

            

  



 



mp



             

mp





mp

 





3

+



pp



  







 

    3



  

sfz

 

    3



3







gliss. gliss.

    

gliss. gliss.

  

gliss. gliss.

mf

gliss. gliss.

pp

 

mf





  

ST



pp

mf

  

gliss. gliss.

pp

gliss. gliss.



ff

  



gliss. gliss.

  

gliss. gliss.



 

ORD

p



  









 

 SP  + sfz





mf

SP +

p

sfz



f

p

  

 



    sffz      



3



H

With bottleneck





   3

mf

   





MST





MST

p







   



MST

p









   p



  

p

     



  

pp



 

mf

  

sfz

sffz

f mp

pp gliss. gliss.

mf

3

p









   

mf

pp









 

pp gliss. gliss.



5

 3     

sffz

3

  

5

         

    



mf

    



5



3





  

p

3

sffz

3



  

p

    

     



                                         

 

sfz



sffz



 3      

p



 

 



5

         

mp



3

  

ppp

Cb.



   



mf

gliss.





mp

3



ppp





mf

pp





pp

3

gliss.

   



f

                            

       

gliss.

 



3



mute

        Hp.   3

 

f

pp

mp



 















f

H 19 meno, q=100   

mp

   







  



 

  



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The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation awards the

Ernst von Siemens Composers Prize to

Mirela Ivičević Mirela Ivièević uses her music to create space for independence and freedom. She breaks through standards, taboos and power structures. A dazzling collage of self-determination, otherness, ­political and personal freedom emerges from her compositions.

The subversive potential of those densely-packed sounds reveals an aesthetic pluralism that recontextualises audio and media fragments from everyday life. Ivièević doesn’t see boundaries but rather plays with analogies and contrasts – non-conformist, energetic and explosive.

Board of Supervisors and Board of Trustees Munich, 1 October 2021

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Mirela Ivičević

Mirela Ivièević’s work focuses on the subversive potential of sound.

The essential part of her œuvre consists of works that recontextualise the sonic, media and other (by-)products of everyday life. Born in Split in 1980, she studied composition and music theory at the Zagreb Music Academy with Željko Brkanović, media composition and applied music with Klaus-Peter Sattler in Vienna and composition with Beat Furrer in Graz. From 2010 to 2017 she worked as co-curator and producer of the festival Dani Nove Glazbe Split. She is one of the co-founders of the Black Page Orchestra, a Viennese ensemble for radical and uncompromising music of our time. Some of her recent works have been created for Black Page ­Orchestra as well as for Klangforum Wien. She received, among others, the State Scholarship of the Austrian Federal Chancellery, the Josip Štolcer Slavenski Prize for the music theatre PLANET 8, and the Erste Bank Composition Prize. In 2019, Mirela Ivièević was a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. She lives and works in Vienna.

Portrait film by Johannes List

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Yair Klartag [*1985]

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Rationale [2021] for soprano and ensemble

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Rationale for soprano and ensemble tries to deal with the boundaries of the “rational” in music through texts by Maimonides from the 12th century about Rationality and its limitations. It deals with the human attempt to find patterns in the continuum of the “real”, the failure in identifying such recurrences and the way we deal with the ungraspable complexity of reality. The text in the work contains the first 109 digits of the decimal approximation of square root of two as well as a quote from Maimonides commentary on the Mishnah, in which Maimonides attempts to find a rational approximation to this irrational number (actually an approximation of √5000, which is 50√2 – the approximation is seventy and five sevens, which corresponds to a 99 /70 approximation of the square root of two). In the end, Maimonides concludes that the inability to reach a good approximation is not a disadvantage but rather that this is the nature of arithmetic: “But a square area that has right angles, will have the size of five thousand cubits. One could not know the side of that area but rather only its approximation. This is since five thousand cubits is a size that does not converge, but can be approximated as seventy and five sevens cubits. [...] Because we will never come to the knowledge of the amount that does not converge, only to its approximation, and it is not a disadvantage in our opinion, because this is the nature of arithmetic.”1 The relation between an irrational number in “nature” and its approximation is also realized musically, in the form of the difference between the tritone interval (frequency ratio of √2) and the 10 /7 ratio between the tenth and the seventh partials in the overtones series.

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aimonides’ commentary on Mishnah Eruvin 2 5 (Approximate translation M by the composer)

Maimonides’s acknowledgment of the limited capabilities of human reason, as well as acknowledging that it is not a disadvantage but a basic and even desirable feature of human nature, was the main inspiration for the musical structure. In the piece, even if patterns and structures can sometimes be identified, the “natural laws” of the musical world as a whole cannot be deciphered. The work ends with another quote of Maimonides from his book Guide for the Perplexed which exemplifies his modesty when attempting to rationally understand nature: “Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us. This is not the case.

At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.”2 Yair Klartag

Guide for the Perplexed – Preface (translated by Michael Friedländer, 1903)

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Half-formed Sonic Edifices becoming the Expressive

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Having double-majored in composition and computer science at Tel Aviv University, Yair Klartag started his professional training at the university’s School of Music, a habitus whose composition faculty have been actively distancing their music from Israeli national topoi for at least five decades. This also included the younger cohort of composition professors at this institution (several of whom were former students) who, too, transitioned from active rejection of national dictates to muting the national soundboard. In the process some drew on pre-modern exilic Jewish musical cultures, but the majority opted for modernist and contemporary European styles (Westernness after all, has been the principal duty of Zionism from its very beginnings). And it paid off for many, since univer­ sality unconditioned by territorialism gave birth to “nationally” orphaned music, and perhaps more importantly to modernist compositional attitudes that kept both tropes of Otherness and postmodern patrimonies at arm’s length.

This is probably why Klartag is more familiar with works by György Ligeti, Helmut Lachenmann, Rebecca Saunders and George Friedrich Haas (with whom he later studied both at the Musik ­Akademie der Stadt Basel and at Columbia University), rather than with music written by the emigrant composers who trained his professors in Israel. Quite unsurprisingly, therefore, Klartag’s works betray disinterest in opposing the regime of national represen­

tations (which were always out of his orbit) or the heteronomy of postmodern borrowings (which he most likely finds mildly amusing).

Yet while remaining fairly unaffected by such national or aesthetic manifestations, and equally suspicious of their communicative ­infrastructure, Klartag relentlessly attempts the repurposing of modernist irony, cynicism, and unavoidable expressivity (and in some instances, unavoidable sentimentality, to paraphrase the title of his 2017 work for ensemble), knowing it would be impossible to challenge their authenticity. And it is this simultaneity of skepticism and detachment that constitutes his writing.

With this in mind we can approach works like Goo-prone (2017), for Saxophone, Trombone, Piano, Accordion and Cello, a work which draws its title from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest (“Hal… theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human…is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile…”).3 Expressive gestures in this work sneak behind a polyphonic layering of quasi motorized assemblages and shimmering harmonies that traverse them, but these gestures are halted midway before acquiring mimetic qualities.

Goo-prone’s production of presence, in other words, shifts from the identification of meaning to problems concerning the emergence of meaning (to paraphrase Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht).

Foster Wallace, David: Infinite Jest, Boston, New York, London 1996, pp: 694–695.

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Klartag’s Moments incommunicables (2011) for Guitar, Flute, Clarinet, Violin and Cello (to give another example) seems to huddle tog­ ether and augment what the composer deems incommunicative.

Only that here, too, Klartag intentionally distances his formulations from meaning-laden references that would eclipse his half-formed sonic structures. Which is why the few utterances that do slip through are fleeting ones, attempting (unsuccessfully) to break away from the foreground that renders present only the emergence of meaning.

Now consider Con forza di gravità (2013 ) for String Orchestra: while the title of this piece is self-telling, and all the more so given the music’s mimetic descending trajectories, it is the sheer movement of sonic formations that exposes and recreates semantic loops.

So much so, that these loops occasionally consolidate into a ­semantic vertigo, as Klartag exposes the work’s objectively mimetic

mechanism, but does so knowing that his listeners will be aware of him disclosing this mechanism while expecting his listeners to unearth this very mutuality of self-awareness. The music thus consciously lays bare its inauthenticity.

Klartag’s half-formed sonic edifices thus show decipherable compositional devices but these remain incommensurable with his semantic twists; at the same time, this deliberate and self-conscious inauthenticity – committed to laying bare these components – ­becomes the expressive.

Assaf Shelleg

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The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation awards the

Ernst von Siemens Composers Prize to

Yair Klartag Through his music, Yair Klartag is always reinventing himself.

He thinks of sound and its perception in terms of a large overall form, as a representation of freedom. His musical output is free of obligations – it is true to itself, always conscious of its intention to non-authenticity. Even irony and cynicism are employed to ­evidence this. His compositions fascinate through the complexity of shimmering harmonies and sound surfaces. Laden with ­tension, Klartag plays with imposing polyphony and expressive musical developments.

Board of Supervisors and Board of Trustees Munich, 1 October 2021

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Yair Klartag

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Yair Klartag is an Israeli composer currently living in Tel Aviv. He has studied composition at Tel-Aviv University, Basel Musikhochschule and Columbia University with Ruben Seroussi and Georg Friedrich Haas.

His music has been commissioned by the Donaueschinger Musiktage, Münchener Kammerorchester, MATA festival, Münchener Biennale and ZeitRäume festival and performed by ensembles such as Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, Vienna Radio Symphony ­Orchestra, Munich Chamber Orchestra, Geneva Chamber Orchestra, Tokyo Sinfonietta, Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra, ensemble ­­recherche, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ensemble mosaik, Ensemble Linea, Meitar ensemble, JACK quartet and the MIVOS quartet in festivals such as Ultraschall Berlin, La Biennale di Venezia, Schwetzinger Festspiele, ECLAT Festival, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, Tage für Neue Musik Zürich and others.

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Yair Klartag received several awards and scholarships: 61. Kompositionspreis der Landeshauptstadt Stuttgart, Henri Lazarof Prize, 31st Irino Prize, “New Classics” prize, Yvar Mikhashoff Prize, 1st place at the “I International Composition Competition Ireneu Segarra” (Spain), 2nd place at “7ème Concours Dutilleux” and “Concours de Genève”, Audience Prize at “Isang Yun Composition Compe­ tition”, Israeli Prime Minister Prize, “Klon” scholarship from Israel Compoers’ League, AKUM prize, STV-KHS Studienpreis, the Schweizer Bundesstipendium as well as artist residencies in Herrenhaus Edenkoben and Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD. His music is published by Ricordi. He is currently teaching composition and analysis at Tel Aviv University.

Portrait film by Daniel Binsted

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Catherine Lamb [*1982]

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Prisma Interius V [2017] for synthesizer | harp, bass clarinet, wine glasses | strings

Prisma Interius is from a series of nine pieces exploring the potentiality aside the secondary rainbow synthesizer, an instrument that utilizes the live surrounding environment as a noise generator for basic subtractive synthesis, narrowing in on the tonal zones the pieces within inhabit. The intention is to allow for a bridge or an infinite thread from the musical structures to the edges of the ­listeners perception. In V, there are two functioning ensembles aside the synthesizer it is highlighting. One is a small string

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­orchestra articulating the expanding harmonic space as a total unit, and the other is a focal trio of bass clarinet, harp, and wine glasses that freely unfold the melodic structures between the ­frames, so that tone, melody, harmony, and the outer edges to noise are blurred.

Premiered by the London Contemporary Orchestra at the Tate M ­ odern Tanks, London, BBC Proms, Summer 2017.

Catherine Lamb’s Interiors

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In her foundational essay Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition, Maryanne Amacher took seriously the work listeners do to perceive “immersive sonic architectures”: “The fact that ears produce their own tones is now completely taken for granted by the scientific community. However, … this astonishing function of our ears is simply not yet acknowledged consciously by the musical community in theory or in musical composition.” 4 In a talk given in late 2019 in Chicago, Catherine Lamb took up Amacher’s theme and offered her own variation on the theme. We have arrived, she argued, in the age of the listener. Our musical practices must reckon with the reality that listeners, musicians, and composers co-create musical worlds. Lamb does not abdicate intentionality, neither does she pander to a bankrupt attention economy whose criteria for success amounts the dopamine-fueled rush toward the next pleasurable distraction, neither does she suggest that listening become a scientistic compositional method gleaned from measurable cognitive responses.

Instead, Lamb’s music opens a space in which listeners find ourselves in states of dis- and reorientation in which we come to ask who is the listener? She realizes processes by which we (quoting Amacher) “particularize acoustic information to construct distinct transformative experiences”.5 The phenomenal richness of her ­music shares some aspects with the epistemologies to which Lamb is indebted (dhrupad via Mani Kaul, just-intonation via James ­Tenney, psychoacoustics via Maryanne Amacher) but is irreducible

Maryanne Amacher, Psychoacoustic Phenomena in Musical Composition: ­ Some Features of a Perceptual Geography, in Arcana III: Musicians on Music, ed. John Zorn (New York: Tzadik, 2008), 9–24, 13.

5 Ibid., 10.

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Sketches Prisma Interius V (2017)

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to them. Her focus on what she calls the “interaction of tone” ­invites us to broadly construe both interaction and tone. Indeed the instruments, technologies, subjectivities, and histories of her ­musicians and audiences interact singularly and unrepeatably as tone. While attending to Lamb’s music, listening becomes the ever-shifting awareness of an interiority spiraling in scale from my own psychoacoustic experiences to the collective space of the room of the musical event to a global sense of listening beyond the boundaries the music draws.

It was a recent performance of Lamb’s music that got me thinking along these lines. Near midwinter’s day in Chicago in 2019 I came to the third-floor ballroom of a repurposed mansion on the city’s Gold Coast to hear Catherine (on viola), her close collaborator and friend, flutist Rebecca Lane, and Olivia Block (on synthesizer), perform Prisma Interius IV at the Graham Foundation.

Prisma Interius IV is part of a series Lamb has been developing since 2017 for the secondary rainbow synthesizer, instruments, and voices. Lamb developed the secondary rainbow synthesizer in collaboration with Bryan Eubanks in 2014. In performance it applies live resonant band-pass filter to audio relayed by microphones placed near the performance space. Depending on the resonant frequencies of the external sounds, the identity of the environment beyond the concert space is more or less recognizable. What began as low rumbles and sustained drones at the beginning of the concert later admitted the sounds of sirens and barking dogs, suturing the city and performances space together into an expan-

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sive interior in which audience, performers, and urban soundscape belonged and listened together. The harmonic plentitude Lamb offers lets me hear more beyond the tones played. I am swept up into a whole environment shaped gently by Lamb and Lane’s contributions of tone. I am forced out of this interior castle when I notice how Lamb seems to guard her own boundaries by closing her eyes – singing and playing for herself amidst of the shards of sound swirling around her. Prisma Interius translates to “interior prism”– a concept apposite for what Lamb’s music accomplishes: the ­refraction, redoubling, and explosion of a crystalline space that both protects and limits our interactions as tone.

Ryan Dohoney

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The Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation awards the

Ernst von Siemens Composers Prize to

Catherine Lamb Catherine Lamb’s music dramatizes the interaction of listener’s percep­tual abilities with compositions whose vitality comes from her engagement with varied musical traditions inclusive of U.S. experimentalism and Hindustani classical music. Her transfor­ mation of these traditions yielded investigations into what she calls “the interaction of tone” – a concept-metaphor Lamb has used to produce a rich fund of music theory, notable for developments of spiral form and crystalline harmonic structures. Lamb has created a body of work that is emotionally generous, formally rigorous, and grounded in the intimacy of friendship and collaboration.

Board of Supervisors and Board of Trustees Munich, 1 October 2021

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Catherine Lamb

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Catherine Lamb (born 1982, Olympia, WA. U.S.) is a composer exploring the interaction of elemental tonality and their summation of shapes, the long introduction form, points of phenomenological expansions, and the architecture of the liminal. She began her musical life early, later abandoning the conservatory in 2003 to study Hindustani music in Pune, India. She received her BFA in 2006 ­under James Tenney and Michael Pisaro at CalArts in Los Angeles, where she first developed her research into the interaction of tone and continued to compose, teach, and collaborate with musicians (such as Laura Steenberge and Julia Holter on Singing by Numbers). In 2008 she received a W. A. Gerbode Foundation and W. & F. Hewlett Foundation Emerging Composers initiative for ­Dilations, premiered at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco.

She mentored under the experimental filmmaker/Dhrupad musician Mani Kaul until his death in 2011. In 2012 she received her MFA in music/sound from the Milton Avery School of Fine Arts at Bard College in New York. She toured Shade/Gradient extensively and was awarded the Henry Cowell Research Fellowship to work with Eliane Radigue in Paris. In 2013 Lamb relocated to Berlin, Germany where she lives currently, and has written for ensembles such as Konzert Minimal, Dedalus, Ensemble neoN, the London Contemporary Orchestra, as well as the JACK Quartet; while collaborating

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Sketches Prisma Interius V (2017)

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regularly with Marc Sabat, Johnny Chang (Viola Torros), Bryan Eubanks, and Rebecca Lane. Her first orchestral work, Portions Transparent/Opaque, was premiered by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the 2014 Tectonics Festival in Glasgow and was ­conducted by Ilan Volkov. She completed a series of nine pieces entitled Prisma Interius (2016 –18 ) in which the infinite opening filter from inner to outer perceptions are deeply explored. She is a 2018 recipient of the Grants to Artists award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Staubach Fellow for the 2016 Darmstadt Summer course as well as a 2016 –2017 Schloss Solitude Fellow.

Her writings/recordings are published in KunstMusik, Open Space Magazine, QO2, NEOS, New World Records, Another Timbre, Other Minds, Winds Measure, Hubro Records, Black Pollen Press, Sound American, and Sacred Realism.

Portrait film by Johannes List

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Samir Amarouch [*1991]

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Electronica-b minor crush [2020 ] for 21 musicians

Instrumental electronics

The encounter with music from new horizons – sometimes sought but often accidental – can produce precious aesthetic offshoots and allow composers to open doors on worlds as yet unknown.

Just as the structures of the Banda-Linda horns revealed by Simha Arom revolutionized the language of Reich or Ligeti, the research and obsessions of certain electronic music composers such as Mark Fell and Rashad Becker have opened up new considerations for me. In Electronica B – Minor Crush for 21 musicians, my re­ flection is on the perception of rhythm and more precisely on the intricacy between timbre and harmony through listening over the long-term. The structure is simple: a single minor ninth chord is repeated homorhythmically at constant intensity by the main group (Accordions, Harpsichord, Piano, Electric Guitar, Percussions) and the only possible impacts are silence (no impact), very short (staccato), very short accented, held, held accented. By reducing the material to such an extreme, the listener’s ear is then only ­focused on the parameter that varies: the rhythm. It should be noted that the lengthening of the duration of an impact, or the accen­tuation in the playing (accent or not for example), are deeply ­significant and that, more generally, each parameter within the per­formance style has repercussions on the perception of rhythm.

Following these principles, the first part of the piece alternates between two states: A) synchronized (homorhythmic) and B) desynchronized (heterorhythmic). This elementary process of

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a­ lternating A and B, where the duration of A decreases while that of B increases, converges towards a superposition of these two states marked by the resonant shock of the plate bells. A new possibility then appears: the accents of the piano become the arrival point of a bass line arpeggiating the notes of the original chord in different registers. As a distant reference to disco funk, even though the pulsation is highly unstable, this line grooves and leads us to the subsequent section.

In the second section, the alternation takes the form of a sway between two impacts, short and long, where the second appears to be the arrival point of the first. Different each time, these impacts develop and are enriched by the orchestration in an explosion of energy. The piece then continues before returning to its initial state, following an arch form of A B transition A’. But upon its recapitulation, the initial chord is transposed many times, thus creating a melody. This melodico-rhythmic perception demonstrates the ­central idea: the initial chord is no longer heard as such, but rather the ensemble merges into a single instrument, hybrid and indefinable, playing a strange melody that gradually takes on the structural characteristics of a traditional song or birdsong.

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Minor Crush

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The word crush is ambiguous in English. Minor crush evokes the strong feelings of love for someone after a brief glance or smile, the desire to embrace that person, but likewise also the crushing of time. This minor crush – represented by a minor chord whose obsessiveness parallels those feelings of obsessive love – is juxtaposed by the sense of crushing. The crushing of a life situation, the crushing of feelings, the crushing of time felt in the variation of rhythm or during a quarantine.

Written from April to July 2020, Electronica B – Minor Crush comes from a context where isolation was imposed and bodies separated. The relevance of writing an ensemble piece in such a context was therefore very difficult to justify. But through the will to work on rhythmic microvariations, the use of a homorhythmic pattern necessary for the realisation of the main idea became an answer to the need to be one with a group. To be able to play together (the word must be emphasized), under the ever-shifting hand of a conductor, each musician must merge in the sound of the other and has to correlate his gesture to that of the others.

The delicate accelerations and slowing downs or the sudden changes of tempo can only be felt in a real group synergy.

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Our time, our life experiences irrigate our imagination. And the influences we are subject to, without cultural or geographical ­borders, nevertheless give birth to singular aesthetics well defined in space-time. Creators appropriate reality and try to shape the ­future. Many of my friends strive for it. This piece is dedicated to them.

Samir Amarouch Congis, Paris, 2020

Naturlaut 3.0

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In Samir Amarouch’s ensemble piece Analogies for sixteen musicians (2017) there is a passage in which the horn and bassoon appear with a run of short glissandi. These twenty five seconds – in which small instrumental gestures are thickly intertwined with each other and yet are clearly definable – demand the listener’s attention.

Suddenly, the music is cast off out of itself, vaguely imitating ­animal noises which resound as if through a window into the flurrying static of its musical surroundings. “As if a natural noise”, as Gustav Mahler described it in a comparable situation – just that here, it could also be wolf howls and not only bird calls or cow bells being evoked. That this experience has since become a common starting point for further artistic creations is a good repre­ sentation of the sense of enquiry and consistency for the composer, born in 1991. One of these was Area (2018 ) for wind quintet and orchestra – formally a kind of concerto grosso, but in actuality a complexly composed interaction between the solo ensemble and a segregated orchestra spread throughout the performance space.

Like a pack of wolves, says Amarouch, the instrumental groups encircle the quintet of soloists in order to communicate with it and its surroundings. Recordings of wolf howls helped during the ­composition phase (he speaks of them as songs), whose shape and acoustic characteristics were then incorporated into the piece’s compositional grammar.

Samir Amarouch’s music thus has a mimicking quality, yet it is anything other than naïve. Nowhere is the sentiment reduced to mere tone-painting or the direct imitation of something that already exists. Rather, inspiration and material is taken from the distortions

of a digital imitation of nature. The point at which these distortions provide diversions from their original source is where things get interesting for Samir Amarouch. In this way, he plays with the idea of tone-synthesis, the biomorphic reproduction of natural processes, but goes a step further. Appel (2017) for dual-manual cembalo and electronics is a good example: it is based on birdcalls which have been edited and transcribed by a computer. The structure of

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the piece and its dramaturgy – the latter centring around an in­ creas­ing intensity during a winding down of its melodic contour – stem from the dispersing of the rhythmic and melodic variations in the bird song which, from the perspective of machinery, can only be seen as a divergence from the ideal form.

Samir Amarouch’s fascination with the grey-zone between virtual and real nature can also be heard in the ensemble piece Analogies for sixteen musicians, as mentioned at the beginning of this text. As in Appel, but more radical, this “nature” (in the form of cicada sounds, birdsong and/or breathing noises) appears here as an acoustic imitation of its digital representation, avoiding all (live-)electronic support. Such a multi-staged virtualisation appears as an act of demonstrative anti-essentialism, as an avoidance of the question as to its “origin” or “prototype” and – in an indirect

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way – to the music’s supposedly natural basis. Furthermore, this projection has consequences for our understanding: the composed sound-piece oscillates between autonomous invention and direct representation, between musical-structural function and metaphorical meaning. And it is not least this transient, changing basis that produces a sense of fascination within the music of ­Samir Amarouch.

Markus Böggemann

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Excerpt from ANALOGIES

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Excerpt from APPEL

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La Fondation Ernst von Siemens pour la Musique décerne à

Samir Amarouch le

Prix de Composition Ernst von Siemens 71

Samir Amarouch voue sa curiosité créatrice aux espaces transitoires entre nature virtuelle et nature réelle. Ses objets sonores s’inscrivent par leur chatoyance entre invention et représentation, entre fonction structurelle musicale et notion métaphorique. Ses œuvres condensent la fascination pour l’éphémère; le sens de la sonorité ainsi révélé interpelle et captive instantanément l’oreille.

Le Conseil de fondation et le curatorium, fait à Munich, le 1 octobre 2021

Samir Amarouch

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Paris-based composer, Samir Amarouch writes music equally inspired by composers such as Grisey, Sciarrino or Romitelli, by the electronic musicians such as Rashad Becker, Oval, or Mark Fell, and by traditional music, such as Gnawa music. Transcribing in the ­instrumental or vocal domain natural sounds (bird songs, wolves howling sound, or other soundscape) and artificial sounds (as ­synthetic sounds, vocoder, or others effects from electronic music), he develops a unique aesthetic querying our relationship with ­environment and technology.

He worked with the Ensemble InterContemporain, the Lucern Alumni Ensemble, the duo Xamp, the harpsichord player Orlando Bass, the conductor Simon Proust, Julien Leroy, InSolitus Ensemble, Vocalists 20.21., the German Ensemble Mosaik, and the symphonic orchestra Orchestre +. Current projects include a new work for ­Risonanze Erranti Ensemble at Gesellschaft für Neue Musik in ­February 2021, and a piece for Ensemble for the Lucerne Festival in August 2021.

Born in France in 1991, Samir Amarouch has finished his Master Degree in composition and new technology (S. Gervasoni, L. Naón, Y. Maresz & O. Saladriguez) with unanimous congratu­lation of the jury at Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris. In 2019, he graduated with the highest ­mention from C. Ledoux’ analysis class. He studied classical guitar with J. Mathelin and J.-M. Zvellenreuther at Boulogne Billancourt Conservatoire, composition with Jean-Luc Hervé and musicology in Paris Sorbonne University. He had private lessons from Tristan Murail, Wolfgang Rihm, Dieter Amman, and Péter Eötvös.

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His work Ceux-là sont la nuit for harp, viola, flute won the Prize of Boulogne Billancourt in 2014. He is a recipient of the Meyer’s ­Fondation Grant. In 2019, a recognition award was granted to him by the French fine arts Academy.

Portrait film by Johannes List

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Malte Giesen [*1988 ]

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Massenprozession [2020 ] for chamber orchestra and 8 -channel electronics

The second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony is often said to have a processional character, exemplified by its basic rhythmic formula, potentially referring to the rhythm of the phrase “Sancta Maria, ora pro nobis”. The movement is likewise quite well-known within pop-culture: being used in films, mostly for fateful, and/or apocalyptic, ritual and unchanging processes carried out by “higher powers”.

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My interpretation of this second movement, or more precisely on the sections in minor (i.e. all but those sections focussed on ­redemption), was originally to be an extended Beethoven instrumentation, but in view of the current and foreseeable restrictions and the accompanying staging limitations, I envisage the following modification: only one instrument from each group is used, with all instruments standing equidistant on the stage, as if in isolation.

The physical as well as musical aspect of the procession is brought to the fore here in two ways. On the one hand, there is currently a special sensitivity for large (human) gatherings; such large gatherings will not be directly available to us for a long time yet, which is why they hold interest, at least in sonic form. On the other hand, the isolated instrumentation, the separation of individuals within the gathering, emphasises the individual within the statistics – a counterweight to the disintegration of individuals within a procession to become a grey “uniform mush” – and, as such, the ­individual performer is physically present on stage, while the electronically-generated virtual sound reflects the mass of statistics.

The individual instruments are pulled and mixed in various ways through the electronic feed, consisting of algorithmically differen-

tiated multiplications of the Beethoven original (up to a layering 4024 times the original recording), and distributed over an 8-channel

setup. Slightly different playback speeds, dynamic deals and phase shifts, for example, create changes in timbre and rhythm, sometimes to the point of unrecognizability, which create new musical structures while still allowing the original to shine through again and again.

Malte Giesen, May 29, 2020

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Meta-reflection, Over-forming and Trend Research in the Music of Malte Giesen

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When it comes to establishing what isn’t possible, Malte Giesen is often at the front of the queue: for example, to create an innovative, original, technically refined and, ideally, unique new work within the demanding world of the string quartet. Or to associate oneself with great genres such as the piano concerto or the opera – with their heavy canon of works behind them – without fundamentally questioning their formal frameworks. Likewise, it seems impossible for him to invent music that is “new” in the literal sense and played exclusively on old instruments. In short: for Malte Giesen, composing often begins with a problem. And yet the resulting solution is not music of resistance or resignation. On the contrary, the result is music that proactively reshapes the problem itself, and that goes further – a compositional fight forward.

This approach is evident in a series of remixes that Giesen composed on the basis of existing models from the 18 th and 19 th centuries. In his Divertimento. Veränderung an Oberflächen (2014 ), he passes sections of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s three Divertimenti (KV 136 –138 ) through the digital shredder. Using a range of common DJ techniques, fragments of the Mozart original are processed electronically – whether sampled, looped, sped up, slowed down or interspersed with brief scratches. “I wanted to treat something that was considered light music in an earlier era – i.e. the divertimento – to the usual procedures of today’s light music”, says Giesen, “above all, technical processing and reproduction. We now receive music more often through headphones or loudspeakers than live in concert.”

For Giesen, an artistic commentary – a further consideration of music – can only take place if the contemporary conditions for its reception are incorporated into the work process. And this includes the presence of (art) music in canned media and in a

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Excerpt from Frame Prescript

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technological, digital everyday environment. For Giesen, this environment includes the use of electronics, but less as an additional musical instrument than as a tool for analysis, distortion and the expansion of possibilities. In his Mass Procession for Chamber ­Orchestra and Tape (2020 ), for example, Giesen electronically ­duplicated the second movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 7th Symphony 1024 times. The musicians in the orchestra then play along with themselves in a kind of multi-layer super ensemble.

Sometimes they push to the foreground, sometimes not. Staggered entry points and different playback speeds of the tracks create a swarm effect in the music, which in places also produces a standstill: “Sometimes you have the impression that a section of several bars is frozen in a single acoustic moment”, says Giesen. “The sound of the segment is clearly preserved, but the temporal progression is suspended – as if one were to remove all the vertical pixels in a picture and leave only the horizontal ones.”

Malte Giesen’s Concerto for Hyperreal Piano and Orchestra (2018 ) also reflects alienation through electronic enhancements.

Here, the soloist plays on a so-called TransAcoustic grand piano

by Yamaha, with which musical features not associated with the piano such as microtonality, glissandi or superhuman repetition speeds can be realised. By decoupling the keyboard from its strings and connecting it instead to sensors, the standard electronic piano

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becomes an instrument whose signals are transmitted via transducers to its soundboard. Thus, the instrument’s body itself becomes a loudspeaker, precisely simulating the acoustic properties of a conventional concert grand piano. But here, instead of producing that stereo sound, which Giesen compares in its artificiality to a 2D beamer projection, the audience is presented with an extended reality – a grand piano that makes the impossible possible, and that negotiates a question that also reaches into other areas of life: What does it mean when the copy is “better” than the original?

The piece of multimedia music theatre FRAME (2018 –20 ) is likewise an exploration of the difference between the original and its – possibly exaggerated, converted – copy. The characters are those actually involved in the creation of the piece, from the composer Malte Giesen to the character of the festival director who commissioned the composition. “In contemporary music,” says Giesen, “there has been repeated criticism that the field is too ­detached from everyday life experiences, too self-referential. And it was precisely this problem that appealed to me. I had the idea of confronting it by developing a piece of music theatre that is maximally self-referential. That’s how FRAME came into being,

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Excerpt from Klavierkonzert

a piece that is practically made from itself.” What may at first seem like uninhibited egocentrism ultimately turns out to be the op­ posite. For it is precisely the permanent meta-thematising of the ­subject matter and its framings that broadens the field of vision and the possibilities for forming judgements.

But adopting a (sometimes critical) observer’s perspective is common practice for Malte Giesen. His interest in developments in everyday, pop and net culture as well as the associated tracking down of phenomena and trends of the here-and-now ensure a rich pool of ideas. The fact that the composer’s involvement in the birth of his pieces plays a role in the resulting compositions is evidenced by piece titles such as stock footage piece 1: business or Septet for Ebay Violins, Amplifiers and Effect Devices. However, he does not stop at just collecting impressions or artefacts and displaying them through quotations or samples. Rather, his works are imbued with imaginative analyses, interpretations and conclusions. And whether packaged in a serious tone or in wry humour, Malte Giesen’s music is the result of an actively lived and consistently thought-out contemporaneity.

Leonie Reineke

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Die Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung verleiht

Malte Giesen den

Ernst von Siemens Komponistenpreis Malte Giesen denkt Musik weiter und stellt auf unterhaltsame und verblüffende Weise alles in Frage, was an ihr selbstverständlich erscheint. Künstlerisch kommentiert und thematisiert er ­zeitgenössische Phänomene sowie traditionelle Gattungen. Seine kritische Beobachterperspektive und sein Interesse an aktuellen Entwicklungen in Alltags-, Pop- und Netzkultur spiegeln sich in seinen Kompositionen wider. Intelligent und kreativ erweitert ­Giesen mit analogen und elektronischen Spielarten unsere Vor­stellungen von Musik.

Stiftungsrat und Kuratorium München, den 1. Oktober 2021

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Malte Giesen

Malte Giesen studied composition/computer music at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Stuttgart with Marco Stroppa and Oliver Schneller, followed by further studies at the CNSM Paris with Gérard Pesson and Hanspeter Kyburz and electro­ acoustic music with Wolfgang Heiniger at the HfM Berlin. He has taught at the HfM Karlsruhe, the HfM Berlin, and the UdK Berlin.

Since June 2021 he is the director of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music at the Akademie der Künste Berlin. He received among others the first prize of the German Music Competition Composition in 2009, a prize of the Master Class ­Orchestra Composition of the SWR in 2012, the Carl von Ossietzky Prize of the City of Oldenburg in 2016, Neue Szenen III of the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the second prize of the Stuttgart Composition Prize in 2017. He received various scholarships from the Association of Friends of the HfMDK Stuttgart, the Oscar and Vera Ritter Foundation, the Friends of the HfM Berlin as well as the Elsa Neumann Scholarship of the State of Berlin. Malte Giesen works interdisciplinarily at the interface of instrumental compo­sition, electronics, and other arts.

Portrait film by Johannes List

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Francesca Verunelli [*1979 ]

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wo.man sitting at the piano [2017/19 ] for flute and piano

The possibility of exploring the abstract purely temporal contribution of electronic thought without any electronic sound drew me to the player piano.

Electronics has expanded the sound world to a great extend but I feel its most important consequences are in the time domain, in the way we can think and write time.

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On the one hand because we can work in temporal “territories” – in extreme speed or in irrational rhythmic complexity for example – which exceed the possibilities of a human interpreter; and on the other hand because what we call timbre, the essence of sound itself, is actually very much dependent on its time structure. Concretely this would mean that working on very different time qualites can result in “unheard-of” sounds, even by the means of a very well-­known instrument and so charged with history as the concert piano is. Therefore sound is time, and the time inside the sound (the microscopic) and built through the sound (the macroscopic) are deeply linked concerning their substance.

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The player piano is a perfectly acoustic piano (as we have known it for centuries), but which can be played by a human interpreter as well as by a machine interpreter. In this case the score is transmitted as a list of informations (which note to play, with which dynamics and when) to the electromechanical mechanism of this piano which replaces the action of the pianist’s fingers with the same result of having the hammer hit the strings. Finally the score is exactly identical to a piano score as we have known it for centuries, but realised by an electromagnetical device instead of the pianist’s fingers.

All the sound collateral or “unwanted” noises and sounds produced by the acoustic instrument are taken into account for their musical sound qualities. Those sounds, which normally are “left behind”, because of their small volume, are carefully listened to and brought to the first plan by the means of specific microscopic listening. And they are a fundamental part of the poetical sound world of these pieces.

In fact we can say, that the “acoustic” character of the piano (its physical structure and presence as an instrument) is even ­accentuated and magnified by the absence of the “traditional” agogic of the instrument playing produced by a musician.

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wo.man sitting at the piano I – for flute, played by a human interpreter, and piano, played by a machine interpreter. piano (without the wo.man) sitting – for piano, played by a machine interpreter. wo.man sitting at the piano III – for bass flute, ­played by a human interpreter, and piano, played by a machine interpreter.

Francesca Verunelli

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Temporality – The Music of Francesca Verunelli

Songs without words. A twenty-minute composition about a dysfunctional machine. A floral arrangement that explodes. What may at first appear to be bizarre about this image – like looking into the closet of an anarchist clown – is in fact the output of a rich musical fantasy and of highly poetic constellations that have grown out of an attempt to solve compositional problems. For Francesca Verunelli, composition is the throwing up of artistic questions which find their preliminary answers in the resulting works. It involves the formulation of paradoxes that can only make sense in an artistic context, and not least the representation of aesthetic experiences for its communication unto others.

Thus, Verunelli’s 2018 orchestral work Tune and Retune gives life to her earliest concert memories and the impression the orchestra gave of being a living, breathing body that opened itself up to its audience. In Five Songs (Kafka’s Sirens), the question is asked: what vocal impressions remain when nobody sings? The allusion to Kafka’s The Silence of the Sirens reveals the direction in which the music wishes to go: the paradox of a silent, yet simultaneously spoken, song is explored by Francesca Verunelli in five sections, which function like snippets of an overall, undefined whole, and thus oscillate between memory and expectation. And when in the first section, entitled “Clockworks and Arias”, the saxophone begins to sing with the expressivity of the almost mute, the ­listener is taken aback not only by the articulation of the voice but also by the gentle salute to the “scene and aria” musical form. Only that, there is no scene prior to the saxophone’s aria, but rather – in contrast to the expressive singing – a depiction of the precision of clocks along with their destruction.

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This playing with quasi-mechanical processes – being destroyed or simply collapsing through an imbalance – can likewise be found in other works of Francesca Verunallis. In Cinemalio (2014 ) for flute, clarinet, piano and string trio, the music focusses in large part on the depiction of a malfunctioning film projector, hence the piece’s title. But it would be wrong to conclude that such textures, which appear throughout her works, serve to provide a direct illustration: in fact, regardless of their imagery, they simply represent themselves and their particular presentation of time. For this is what composition is for Francesca Verunelli: the designing, combining, ­intersecting and confronting of different forms of time within the medium of music. And because, for her, every single sound has an individual temporality due to the individual way it is struck and stopped, her work appears on both the detailed as well as on the aggregate level to be a fantastical and consequential depiction of time.

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An extreme example of this can be found in the piece Ultimi Fiori for cello (2017). An almost unceasingly slow harmony of unstable partial tones forces the ear into a micro perspective in order to discover the rich, differentiated melody. It is – regardless of the frugality of its medium – breath-taking. But even Francesca ­Verunelli’s larger works offer such enthralling moments. Her music pulls you into a spell and demands attention when it sounds.

Markus Böggemann

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La Fondazione per la Musica Ernst von Siemens conferisce a

Francesca Verunelli il

Premio dei Compositori Ernst von Siemens 105

Per Francesca Verunelli comporre significa porre questioni di ­natura ­artistica: a partire da problemi di carattere compositivo, con ­ricchezza di fantasia genera eventi musicali che affascinano per la loro struttura e incantano per il loro timbro. Con la sua ­musica formula paradossi tra ricordo e attesa che possono ­essere resi percepibili solo in una arte ­ambiziosa come quella di ­Francesca Verunelli.

Il consiglio e la commissione della Fondazione Monaco di Baviera, 1 ottobre 2021

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Francesca Verunelli

Francesca Verunelli studied composition with Rosario Mirigliano and piano with Stefano Fiuzzi at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence where she earned both diplomas summa cum laude.

She concluded her studies at the Accademia Santa Cecilia, with Azio Corghi. She went on to attend IRCAM’s training in Composition and Computer Music.The same year, at La Biennale di Venezia, she was awarded the “Leone d’argento” prize.

She received commissions from important musical institutions and festivals such as IRCAM, NeueVocalsolisten Stuttgart, La Biennale di Venezia, Orchestre Philarmonique de Radio France, Milano Musica, Accentus Chamber Choir, Lucerne Symphonic ­Orchestra, Court-Circuit ensemble, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, GMEM de Marseille, CIRM de Nice, the French State, the FACE Foundation, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, International Contemporary Ensemble, Donaueschinger MusikTage, ECLAT, ­Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg, Klangforum Wien, musica viva – Munich.

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She has been composer in residence at Ircam, at GMEM of Marseille, at Casa de Velasquez (Madrid – 2015 /2016 ) et at Villa Médicis (Académie de France à Rome – 2016 /17). During the summer of 2021, she was composer in residence at Festival des Quators du Luberon, where the Béla Quartet premiered Unfolding II. Upcoming premieres also include Accord, chord and tune for accordion and orchestra, written for Krassimir Sterev and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (december 2021), a new ­piece for string orchestra written for Ensemble Resonanz (march 2022), In bianco e nero for Ircam Espro reopening (june 2022), and Tune and retune II for SWR Symphony Orchestra/Donaueschinger Musiktage 2022), a new piece for Sigma Ensemble commissioned by Luxembourg Rainy Days 2022, and Songs and Voices a one-hour long piece for voices and ensemble co-commissioned by Neue Vocalsolisten, GMEM, Ircam and ­Venice Biennale to be premiered in February 2024.

Portrait film by Johannes List

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Excerpt from wo.man sitting at the piano (2017/19)

Einat Aronstein, Sopran

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Israeli born soprano Einat Aronstein is an Ensemble member of Theater Trier, where she sings roles such as Sophie (Der Rosen­ kavalier), Rosina (Il Barbiere di Siviglia), Musetta (La Bohème) ­Susanna (Le Nozze di Figaro), Drusilla (L’incoronazione di Poppea), Valencienne (Die lustige Witwe) and die junge Frau (Reigen). last year she sang the main role in the opera Der Goldene Drache by Péter Eötvös with the Israeli Contemporary Players and conductor Zsolt Nagy both in Israel and in Hungary.

Since 2012 she performs increasingly in European opera productions such as Baruchs Schweigen (Ella Milch-Sheriff) at the Stadttheater Fürth, Germany, and EntArteOpera, Vienna, Gespräch mit einem Stein (Sheriff) and Der Garten (Josef Tal), Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, Germany, as well as Théatre D’Esch, Luxemburg and Else (Tal) in the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg.

Einat has been a guest artist with numerous orchestras and baroque ensembles, among them the Israeli Philharmonic Orchestra and all other major orchestras in Israel, Residentie Orkest The Hague, Barrocade Ensemble and the Jerusalem Baroque Orchestra under such conductors as Zubin Mehta, Christian Zacharias, Andrew Parrott, Dan Ettinger and David Stern among others. Einat sings regularly in renowned international festivals such as Innsbrucker Festwochen der Alten Musik, Festival Classique Den Haag and Aldeburgh Festival.

As a Lied singer, Einat has collaborated with some of Israel’s most renowned pianists, among whom Arie Vardi is most notable, and has given recitals in The Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Scotland, France, Spain, Poland, China and Vietnam.

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In 2012 Einat graduated from the Buchmann-Mehta School of Music where she studied under Ms. Efrat Ben-Nun. She has been a recipient of the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Awards for Outstanding Musical Performance since 2008 and has received scholarships from the Israel Vocal Arts Institute Foundation and the Ronen Foundation. She received first prize at The BuchmannMehta Vocal Competition, the Atle Vestersjø Young Talent Award at the 3rd International Singing Competition for Baroque Opera Pietro Antonio Cesti in Innsbruck, Austria, the second prize at the Concorso Lirico Città di Magenta in Italy and the audience prize at the Concours International de Chant des Châteaux en Médoc 2013 in Bordeaux, France.

Most recently, she won the first prize and the audience prize with her Baroque ensemble, Ensemble Arava, at the International Competition for Concert Presentation in Frankfurt, Germany.

The Ensemble will release its Debut Album later this year including pieces by Händel, Caldara and Biber.

David Niemann, Conductor

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German conductor David Niemann is establishing himself as one of the most promising conductors of his generation. Second prize winner of the 2015 Malko Conducting Competition, in February 2015 he was appointed Assistant Conductor at the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier, where he worked alongside chief conductor Michael Schønwandt from 2015 until 2018. He is developing a broad mainstream repertoire and is equally a persuasive advocate of twentieth century and contemporary repertoire.

Earlier this season, his highly successful short notice debut with Helsingborg Symphony immediately led to invitations to return for three further, varied programmes. The 2020 /2021 season will also see debuts with Orchestre National de Belgique, Aalborg Symphony and Malmö Opera (Falstaff and symphonic concerts) alongside a return to the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg.

Recent highlights have included debut appearances with both Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Ensemble Modern (Hamburg Elbphilharmonie); a special interdisciplinary project with Junge Deutsche Philharmonie featuring new commissions with the most renowned artists of the German-speaking poetry slam scene; Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, paired with Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, to open the Barcelona concert season of the Valles Symphony in the iconic Palau de la Musica. Engagements have also included a series of projects with Qatar Philharmonic, a number of visits to Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse, Luxembourg Philharmonic; many main season and regional concerts with the Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier and concerts with Opéra National de Lorraine and Orchestre ­Lyrique Région Avignon Provence.

Earlier seasons featured Residentie Orkest, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and Orchestre National de Lille, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Nederlands Phil­ harmonisch Orkest, Stuttgarter Kammerorchester and Hamburger Symphoniker. His many projects for Opéra Orchestre National Montpellier included notable staged productions of Schumann’s Manfred, a double bill of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges and Szymon Laks’ L’Hirondelle inattendue and La Boîte à joujoux –

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Debussy’s ballet for children. While in Montpellier he conducted many orchestral programmes featuring core symphonic repertoire such as Dvorak Symphony No. 9, Brahms, Mozart and Beethoven.

In 2013 he assisted Emmanuel Krivine in a production of Schumann’s Manfred at the Opéra Comique (Paris). While still a ­student he conducted Così fan tutte and Die Fledermaus at the ­Academy of Music, Leipzig, and Christian Jost’s The Arabian Night at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg.

Initially a passionate violinist, David commenced his conducting studies in 2007 as a pre-student at the Folkwang University of his hometown of Essen with David de Villiers and continued his studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Leif Segerstam, at the Dutch National Masters of Conducting programme with Ed Spanjaard and Jac van Steen, in addition to the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg with Ulrich Windfuhr and holds a Masters’ degree from those last two institutions.

Ensemble Modern

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Since its founding in 1980, Ensemble Modern (EM) has been among the leading New Music ensembles. It currently unites around 20 soloists from Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, Greece, India, Israel, Japan, the USA and Switzerland, illustrating the culturally diverse background of the ensemble. Resident in Frankfurt am Main, the ensemble is known for its unique democratic organisation and working method. Artistic projects, partnerships and financial matters are decided and implemented jointly. Its unique and distinctive programming includes musical theatre works, dance and video projects, chamber music, ensemble and orchestral concerts. Tours and guest appearances have taken it to the most renowned festivals and distinguished performance venues, such as the Berliner Festspiele, Bregenzer Festspiele, Cité de la Musique, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Hellerau Dresden, Holland Festival, Klangspuren Schwaz, Konzerthaus Berlin, Kölner Philharmonie, Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen, Ruhrtriennale, Salzburger Festspiele, Wien Modern and Wigmore Hall London.

In its hometown, Ensemble Modern has had its own subscription series at the Alte Oper Frankfurt since 1985. It regularly produces musical theatre works in cooperation with the Frankfurt Opera, as well as a series of workshop concerts entitled ›Happy New Ears‹.

Since 2011 Ensemble Modern has joined the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra in presenting the festival ›cresc... Biennial for Current Music Frankfurt Rhine Main‹. Further cooperations and projects round out the multi-faceted profile of Ensemble Modern.

The ensemble strives to achieve the highest possible degree of authenticity by working closely with the composers themselves.

The musicians rehearse an average of 70 new works every year, 20 of which are world premieres.

Its work is characterised by extraordinary and often long-term cooperative ventures with renowned artists, such as John Adams, Mark Andre, George Benjamin, Peter Eötvös, Brian Ferneyhough,

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Heiner Goebbels, Hans Werner Henze, Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, Helmut Lachenmann, György Ligeti, Olga Neuwirth, Enno Poppe, Rebecca Saunders, Simon Steen-Andersen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Steve Reich, Frank Zappa or Vito Žuraj, as well as outstanding artist personalities from other artistic genres.

In addition to its multi-faceted concert activities, Ensemble Modern presents the results of its work through regular recordings, many of which have won multiple awards. Almost 50 of the more than 150 CD productions have been released by the ensemble’s own label, Ensemble Modern Media. In 2003 Ensemble Modern bundled its existing education and further education ­projects under one roof, founding the International Ensemble ­Modern Academy (IEMA) with the goal of passing on the musical heritage of modernism. IEMA’s formats developed especially for specific target groups include the Master’s Degree Programme in contemporary music for young professional musicians in cooperation with the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts as well as international master courses, composition seminars and school projects. All these pursue the goal of educating a broad public about a great variety of contemporary musical tendencies and an open, creative approach to artistic processes. www.ensemble-modern.com www.facebook.de/EnsembleModern www.twitter.com/ensemblemodern Ensemble Modern is funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation, the City of Frankfurt, the German Ensemble Academy, the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts. The Ensemble Modern musicians thank the Aventis Foundation for financing a chair in their ensemble. hr2-kultur is Ensemble Modern’s cultural affairs partner.

CD-Reihe der Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung

Die Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung zeichnet nicht nur renommierte Komponisten, Interpreten oder Musikwissenschaftler, die für das internationale Musikleben Hervorragendes geleistet haben, mit dem Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis aus. Seit 1990 vergibt sie außerdem jährlich drei Preise an junge Komponisten, um deren vielversprechendes Talent zu fördern. Zu den bisherigen Preisträgern aus über zwanzig Ländern gehören inzwischen so bekannte Namen wie Beat Furrer, Enno Poppe, Olga Neuwirth, Jörg Widmann und Mark Andre.

Seit 2011 stellt die Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung in Zusammenarbeit mit herausragenden Ensembles und Solisten der zeitgenössischen Musik sowie mit den öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunkanstalten das Schaffen dieser aufstrebenden Komponistengeneration vor.

Oft besteht für die Komponisten in diesem Rahmen erstmals die Möglichkeit, auch Werke in größerer Besetzung auf Tonträger zu präsentieren. Jede CD versteht sich als individuelles Porträt eines Preisträgers, dessen künstlerisches Selbstverständnis dem internationalen Publikum durch einführende Kommentare, Analysen und Hintergrundinformationen nahegebracht wird.

Nach und nach soll sich mit der CD -Reihe der Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung ein breit angelegtes Panorama der zeitgenössischen Ernsten Musik entfalten, das aktuelle Tendenzen aufspürt und dokumentiert.

Die Porträt-CD -Reihe erscheint seit 2019 beim Label KAIROS in Wien.

ernst von siemens musikstiftung

www.evs-musikstiftung.ch

www.kairos-music.com

Bislang erschienen:

Steven Daverson

Hèctor Parra

Hans Thomalla

Luke Bedford

˘ Zeynep Gedizlioglu

Ulrich A. Kreppein

David Philip Hefti

Marko Nikodijevic

Samy Moussa

Brigitta Muntendorf

Luis Codera Puzo

Simone Movio

Mark Barden

Birke J. Bertelsmeier

Christian Mason

Milica Djordjević

David Hudry

Gordon Kampe

Lisa Streich

Michael Pelzel

Timothy McCormack

Clara Iannotta

Coming soon: Catherine Lamb, Annesley Black

räsonanz – Stifterkonzert Lucerne 2022 An initiative of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, organised by Lucerne Festival

August 30, 2022 | 7.30 p.m.

Concert hall of KKL

Kaija Saariaho Vista for orchestra (2019 ), Swiss premiere Dieter Ammann The Piano Concerto (Gran Toccata) (2016 –2019 ), Swiss premiere Commissioned by Munich Philharmonic, BBC Radio 3, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Wiener Konzerthaus, Lucerne Festival, Taipeh Symphony Orchestra and Pro Helvetia Per Nørgård Symphony No. 8 (2011), Swiss premiere Jean Sibelius Tapiola. Symphonic poem for large orchestra op. 112 (1926 ) Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra Susanna Mälkki, Conductor Andreas Haefliger, Piano

räsonanz is an initiative of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation organised by Lucerne Festival and musica viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk. www.evs-musikstiftung.ch www.lucernefestival.ch www.br-musica-viva.de

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BR-KLASSIK is recording the concert. It will be broadcasted on October 12, 2021 at 8.05 p.m.

The concert will be streamed live at www.ensemble-modern.com and www.evs-­ musikstiftung.ch. Produced by Nightfrog Media & Film for the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Production and realization: Benedict Mirow, NIGHTFROG GmbH, www.nightfrog.com Die Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation thanks the Siemens AG for generously providing the Munich offices.

Text credits: Shilla Strelka: Sweet Dreams | also: Ecstatic Soundworlds and the Politics of Privacy | Yair Klartag: Rationale | Assaf Shelleg: Half-formed Sonic Edifices becoming the Expressive | Ryan Dohoney: Catherine Lambs Interiors | Samir Amarouch: Electronica-b minor crush | Markus Böggemann: Naturlaut 3.0 | also: Temporality – Francesca Verunelli’s Music | Malte Giesen: 1. Massenprozession | Leonie Reineke: Meta-reflection, Over-forming and Trend Research in the Music of Malte Giesen | Francesca Verunelli: wo.man sitting at the piano All translations into English: Robert Jacobs.

All rights by the authors.

Photo credit: Michael Roßnagl: Manu Theobald | Yair Klartag: Jonas Opperskalski | All others: Rui Camilo | Einat Aronstein: Michael Pavia | David Niemann: Mario Sinastaj | Ensemble Modern: Wonge Bergmann Sketches/manuscripts: Private granting by the composers Portrait films composers: Johannes List, www.fritzzfilm.de Film Yair Klartag: Daniel Binsted Imprint: Editor: Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung, Zug, Switzerland www.evs-musikstiftung.ch Managing director: Nicole Willimann Secretary of the Board of Trustees: Michael Roßnagl Copy editing: Imke List and Tanja Pröbstl Design: jäger & jäger, www.jaegerundjaeger.de

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