Renate Birnstein

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Renate Maria Birnstein (born November 17, 1946 in Hamburg ) is a German composer and university professor.

Life

From the age of seven, she received violin, viola and piano lessons and began composing at an early age. From 1969 to 1973 she studied composition and music theory with Diether de la Motte and then with György Ligeti at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater . She has received numerous awards and grants, including a. at the international composition competition for chamber music in Hitzacker, the Stuttgarter Förderpreis (1978), the Bach Prize scholarship of the city of Hamburg (1979) and 1982/83 an annual scholarship for the Villa Massimo in Rome.

From 1988 to 2013 Renate Birnstein was professor for composition and music theory at the Hamburg University of Music and Theater . She has been a member of the Free Academy of the Arts Hamburg since 1988 .

Works

Her compositions are entirely committed to the principles of new music . In the beginning she was guided by the twelve-tone technique of the second Viennese school ( Alban Berg and Anton Webern ) and serial techniques and composed instrumental music for orchestras or chamber music ensembles such as B. string quartet or piano trio. From 1972 she was one of the few female composers to take part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music . The lessons with Ligeti resulted in a reorientation. She dealt with the work of Steve Reich and combined techniques of minimal music with “European formal thinking”. In order to focus on the different levels of the musical perspective - foreground, middle and background - she dissolved the traditional sound groups and thus removed the boundaries between orchestral and chamber music. The levels of perspective were separated from one another and confronted with one another by superimposing different time signatures, meters and tempos. So z. B. the sextet for six ensembles (1981) and the sextet for clarinet, viola, violoncello and three percussionists ( ... and from Abend und Morgen , 1999). The piano cycle Les temps , which has been in existence since the late 1990s, was initially shaped by this technique.

In her vocal works she set, among other things, Poems by Georg Trakl , Annette von Droste-Hülshoff , Georg Heym and deals with Marie Luise Kaschnitz . The ballad Pranto ocre was created in 2003 based on a text by the Brazilian poet Paes Loureiro . In the 24-part choral work in terra (1978) she developed her own minimalist style using a “pattern technique”.

Renate Birnstein describes her compositional process as "the endeavor to express something personal musically" and as the desire "to explore the musical 'material', to discover how it behaves when I work with it compositionally."

Selected Works:

  • Imaginations. For large orchestra, 1972 (premiered in Hilchenbach 1976).
  • in terra . For 24-part a capella choir, 1978 (Sikorski Verlag Hamburg 1979).
  • I call with my voice. Sacred concert for soprano, alto, bass, violin and organ, 1980–81 (premiered in Hamburg 1981).
  • Octet, for flute, clarinet, trombone, violin, viola, violoncello and two percussionists, 1984 (on behalf of the Bavarian Radio, premiered in Munich 1985).
  • Pranto ocre . Ballad for baritone and piano based on a text by the Brazilian poet Paes Loureiro , 2003.
  • Piano cycle Les Temps , 1994-2001.
  • The day is sunk in purple. 5 songs for tenor and piano based on poems by Georg Heym , 2018.

literature

  • Roswitha Sperber: Renate Birnstein . In: Grove Music Online, January 2001 (accessed June 29, 2020).
  • Brigitte Schulze: A portrait . In: new territory. Approaches to contemporary music, ed. by Herbert Henck, Gisela Gronemeyer and Deborah Richards (= yearbook, 4). Bergisch Gladbach, Neuland Musikverlag 1984, pp. 159–169.
  • Diether de la Motte : On the situation of young German composers . In: Tendencies between tonality and atonality, ed. by Reinhold Brinkmann (= publications of the Institute for New Music and Music Education, Darmstadt, 18). Mainz, Schott Verlag 1978, pp. 42-48.
  • Martina Bick: Renate Maria Birnstein . In: Lexikon Musik und Gender, ed. by Annette Kreutziger-Herr and Melanie Unseld. Kassel, Bärenreiter / Metzler Verlag 2010, pp. 148–149.

Web links

Commons : Renate Birnstein  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ https://mugi.hfmt-hamburg.de/artikel/Renate_Birnstein.html accessed on June 23, 2020
  2. ^ Roswitha Sperber: Renate Birnstein. In: Grove Music online. Oxford University Press, 2001, accessed August 18, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Martina Bick: Renate Birnstein. In: Music and Gender on the Internet (MUGI). Beatrix Borchard and Nina Noeske, HfMT Hamburg, 2006, accessed on August 18, 2020 .
  4. ↑ For a complete catalog of works, see Music and Gender on the Internet
personal data
SURNAME Birnstein, Renate
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Birnstein, Renate Maria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer
DATE OF BIRTH November 17, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Hamburg