Winter 2024 – Summer 2025 News & Events

The first half of 2025 is a fairly busy period of projects, including several exciting conducting projects with, among others, ELISION and Ensemble Musikfabrik.

The year begins with a recording project at Deutschlandfunk with Musikfabrik for the new Podium Gegenwart portrait disc of Dariya Maminova, who I first worked with when she was still a student participating in one of the Musikfabrik “Adventure” series concerts. This is also the common thread for the Musikfabrik im WDR concert in the early summer, with music from Lucia Kilger, also a previous “Adventure” series collaborator.

The spring is anchored with two events. My longtime friends ELISION are on tour in Europe in April, and that tour kicks off with a concert and residency that overlaps with my Erasmus residency at the Gustav Mahler Privatuniversität in Klagenfurt, Austria. I’ll give two lectures and masterclasses in both conducting and composition, as well as conducting in the ELISION concert, and the ELISION players are giving various workshops and masterclasses that week as well. My old friend and former colleague Liza Lim is also at GMPU that week for her own guest lecture, so it’s quite a week of opportunities for the students there! The ensemble continues on to Croatia and then to Leipzig, with a few additional performances of some solo pieces of mine along the way.

Later in April is the annual Klangbrücken festival in Hannover. I have my first concert with Ensemble Incontri, the Musikhochschule’s new music ensemble, performing work by Boulez and Berio (as everywhere, in 2025), alongside music from Aldo Clementi (also born in 1925), Matthew Shlomiwitz (1975), and Peter Ablinger. And Das Neue Ensemble will again present my solo string piece The Crutch of Memory, now somehow already more than 20 years old, in a performance by the excellent cellist Jessica Kuhn.

In June I travel once again to Melbourne for this year’s installment of the ELISION residency at the Australian National Academy of Music. Last year’s project on the work of Liza Lim and Richard Barrett was a huge success, so the project this year has been extended a bit, with two concerts at the end of the week of rehearsals and workshops. I’ll be conducting Xenakis Eonta (which has long been on the conducting wishlist), Donatoni Spiri (likewise), Lim Veil, and Mundry Le Voyage, with an ensemble combining players from ELISION with the students of ANAM.

In the midst of it all, I’m working on two new pieces (a solo for bassoon, which is a companion piece to the E-flat clarinet solo I wrote a few years ago, plus a new duo for violin and piano—a “sonata” (seriously)) and an article reflecting on the 10-year anniversary of my “Imagining a Non-Geometrical Rhythm” inaugural professorial lecture.

At HMTMH/Incontri we’re moving into our three new teaching rooms, in the space vacated by the music library when it moved to its new location, so my time at work has been focused on discussing architectural diagrams, meeting with electricians, and buying loads of new gear for our three new electronic music studios. We’re excited about the new opportunities that the new spaces will provide, particularly the new ‘New Music Lab’, which, when it’s done, will be a kind of ‘creativity space’, with 7.1-channel electronics, a massive 85″ interactive whiteboard, and a large collection of digital and analog instruments. And the ‘Immersive Audio Studio’ will expand from 8 channels to a larger dome-like loudspeaker configuration. It’s been a fun project! And, as always, the Summer Semester is very busy with guest composers and performers, presenting the results of various workshops and collaborative projects from the academic year.

Various additional projects, performances, radio broadcasts, and other details are below.