Wolfgang von Schweinitz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wolfgang von Schweinitz (born February 7, 1953 in Hamburg ) is a German composer .

Life

Wolfgang von Schweinitz received in Washington, DC from 1965 to 1969 teaching in theory of composition and music theory at Esther Balou . After graduating from high school , he studied composition at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater , from 1971 to 1973 with Ernst Gernot Klussmann and from 1973 to 1975 with György Ligeti . This was followed by study and work stays at Stanford University with John Chowning as well as in Mexico and Guatemala . From 1976 to 1978 he lived in Munich , 1978 to 1979 as a scholarship holder in the Villa Massimo in Rome ; at the same time as Sarah Kirsch , whose cycle of poems paper stars he set to music in 1980/81. In 1980 he was a lecturer at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. After a few years in Bothel and Heide (Holstein) , he moved to Berlin in 1993 , before holding a visiting professorship for composition at the Liszt School of Music in Weimar from 1994 to 1996 . He then lived again in Berlin until he was appointed to the Roy E. Disney Family Chair in Musical Composition at the California Institute of the Arts in Lancaster in 2007 as the successor to James Tenney .

In 1986 von Schweinitz was awarded the Schneider Schott Music Prize in Mainz and in 1992 the Hindemith Prize .

plant

Schweinitz had his breakthrough as a composer with his Mozart Variations op. 12 (1967/77). This orchestral piece, based on eight bars from Mozart's Maurerischer Funeral Music , shaped the image of the composer, who also consciously resorted to traditional forms or compositions by well-known composers in other early works in order to process them in a tonality "polluted" by clusters. Therefore, together with the composers Wolfgang Rihm , Hans-Jürgen von Bose , Hans-Christian von Dadelsen , Detlev Müller-Siemens and Manfred Trojahn , who were working in a similar manner at the time, the criticism provided him with the label New Simplicity , coined by Aribert Reimann , which opposes the at that time in the Western European avant-garde preferred serial music . In the 90s Schweinitz turned to the composition in the pure mood . For these works he developed the extended Helmholtz-Ellis notation in cooperation with Marc Sabat and using works by Hermann von Helmholtz and Alexander John Ellis , which he presented to the public in concerts with the help of an orthotonophonium .

Discography

  • Variations on a Theme by Mozart . Harmonia Mundi Germany 1027 (record).
  • Mass for solos, choir and orchestra op.21 . Wergo 60504-50 (CD).

literature

  • Ulrich Dibelius : Modern Music II 1965-1985. Munich 1988, p. 163 and 165.
  • Matthias Tischer: Wolfgang von Schweinitz. In: Contemporary composers. Edited by Hanns-Werner Heister and Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer. Munich 1992ff., 12th subsequent delivery 1997.
  • Frederik Knop: "Schweinitz, Wolfgang von". In: The music in past and present , person part 15, Sp. 433ff.

Awards

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Concert on May 6, 2001 ( memento of November 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ), Klangzeitort, accessed on September 24, 2014
personal data
SURNAME Schweinitz, Wolfgang von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baron von Kauder, Wolfgang Graf von Schweinitz and Krain (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH 7th February 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg