Anthony Paul De Ritis, Composer
Composer Anthony Paul De Ritis is Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Northeastern University in Boston. His compositions have been called “absorbing,” “bracingly imaginative,” “highly infectious,” “engaging,” “undeniably arresting,” and “really cool.” He has have received performances nationally and internationally; most notably, the Prague Philharmonic premiered his Melody for Peace for Western and non-Western instruments at UNESCO headquarters in Paris, a concert reprised by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center, New York.

George Crumb, Composer
George Crumb’s reputation as a composer of hauntingly beautiful scores has made him one of the most frequently performed composers in today’s musical world. From Los Angeles to Moscow, and from Scandinavia to South America, festivals devoted to the music of George Crumb have sprung up like wildflowers. Crumb, the winner of a 2001 Grammy Award and the 1968 Pulitzer Prize in Music, continues to compose new scores that enrich the musical lives of those who come in contact with his profoundly humanistic art.

Karlheinz Essl, Composer
Born 1960 in Vienna. Studies at the Wiener Musikhochschule: composition (Friedrich Cerha), electro-acoustic music (Dieter Kaufmann) and double bass (Heinrich Schneikart). Studies at the University of Vienna: musicology (1989 doctoral thesis on Das Synthese-Denken bei Anton Webern).
His work with computers (with emphasis on Algorithmic Composition) and a prolonged occupation with the poetics of serial music have been a formative influence on his compositional thinking. Besides writing instrumental music, Karlheinz Essl also works in the field of electronic music, interactive realtime compositions and sound installations. Since the early 90’s he has developed software environments for interactive algorithmic composition in real time which he uses for his own live performances and also in collaboration with artists from other fields (choreographers, dancers, visual artists and poets).

Annie Gosfield, Composer
Hailed as ”a star of the downtown scene” by the New Yorker magazine, Annie Gosfield lives and works in New York City, where she divides her time between performing on piano and sampler with her own group and composing for many ensembles and soloists. Much of her music explores the inherent beauty of non-musical sounds, and is inspired by diverse sources such as machines, destroyed pianos, warped 78 records, and detuned radios.

Georg Hajdu, Composer
Georg Hajdu, born in Göttingen, Germany in 1960, is among the first composers of his generation dedicated to the combination of music, science and computer technology. After studies in Cologne and at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), he received his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. In 1996, following residencies at IRCAM and the ZKM, Karlsruhe, he co-founded the ensemble WireWorks with his wife Jennifer Hymer – a group specializing in the performance of electro-acoustic music. In 1999, he produced his full- length opera Der Sprung. In May 2002, his Internet performance environment Quintet.net was employed in a Munich Biennale opera performance. In addition to his compositions, which are characterized by a pluralistic attitude and have earned him several international prizes, the IBM-prize of the Ensemble Modern among them, Georg Hajdu has published articles on several topics on the borderline of music and science. His areas of interest include multimedia, microtonality, algorithmic, interactive and networked composition. Currently, Georg Hajdu is professor of multimedia composition at the Hamburg School of Music and Theater.

Jennifer Hymer, Kalimba
Jennifer Hymer received degrees of music at UC Berkeley and Mills College. Her teachers have included Julie Steinberg, James Avery and Bernhard Wambach. Interested in different and unusual sonic possibilities of the piano, she specializes in repertoire for piano and multi-media as well as extended techniques. Moving to Germany in 1995, she consequently co-founded the electro- acoustic ensemble WireWorks; an ensemble for acoustic instruments, voice and electronics, with composer Georg Hajdu. She currently resides in Hamburg.

David Lang, Composer
"There is no name yet for this kind of music," writes Los Angeles Times music critic Mark Swed, but audiences around the globe are hearing more and more of David Lang’s work: in performances by such organizations as the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Santa Fe Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the San Francisco Symphony, The Cleveland Orchestra, and the Kronos Quartet; at Tanglewood, the BBC Proms, The Munich Biennale, the Settembre Musica Festival, the Sidney 2000 Olympic Arts Festival and the Almeida, Holland, Berlin and Strasbourg Festivals; and in the choreography of Edouard Lock and La La La Human Steps, Twyla Tharp, the Paris Opera Ballet, The Nederlands Dans Theater and the Royal Ballet.

Sascha Lino Lemke, Composer
Sascha Lino Lemke, born in Hamburg in 1976, studied music theory, composition and electronic music in Hamburg, Lüneburg and Paris (CNSMDP, IRCAM). He received a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and has additionally received numerous other awards such as the Kranichsteiner Stipendienpreis (Darm- stadt), Hamburg’s Bachpreisstipendium, Dresden’s Musik-Stipendium and the ECPNM Live Electronic Award from the Gaudeamus Music Week 2008. For 2009 he was awarded a scholarship for a residency in Casi Baldi/Olevano. Sascha Lino Lemke is a lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg and the Musikhochschule Lübeck.

Lukas Ligeti, Composer
Lukas Ligeti was born in Vienna, Austria, and studied at the Vienna Music University. Upon completing his studies there, he spent 1994-1996 as a visiting scholar at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. Since 1998, he has lived in New York City.

Oliver Schneller, Composer
Oliver Schneller (b. 1966 in Cologne) grew up in Africa, Europe and Asia and studied in Germany and the USA. After completing a MA in political science and musicology at the University of Bonn he worked for the Goethe Institute in Kathmandu, Nepal (1990-91) on a project to support and sustain local forms of traditional musical practice. In 1994 he moved to the USA, first studying composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston, then at Columbia University New York as a student of Tristan Murail, where he received his doctoral degree in composition (2002) with a thesis on music and space. At the City University of New York he developed and expanded the CUNY Computer Music Studio. From 2000-01 he lived in Paris as a participant of the cursus annuel de composition et d’informatique at IRCAM/Centre Pompidou. As an assistant to Tristan Murail he taught composition and computer music at Columbia, and organized the "Lachenmann in New York" Festival in 2001. Throughout his studies, masterclasses with Salvatore Sciarrino, Jonathan Harvey, Brian Ferneyhough, George Benjamin and Vinko Globokar provided important orientations.

Manfred Stahnke, Composer
Manfred Stahnke was born in Kiel in 1951. His early interests were in painting, tuning systems and improvisation (piano). Studies in composition and musicology began in 1966 in Lübeck, Freiburg, Hamburg and the USA. He did his doctoral studies in Hamburg with Constantin Floros with a dissertation on Pierre Boulez.

Electroacoustic Music Series
Organized by the Music Technology program at Northeastern University
Spring 2010: Concert 3 of 4
Tuesday March 16, 8 PM
The Goethe Institute Boston
FREE