Artists – e.poesie

Ondřej Adámek

Ondřej Adámek (born 1979 in Prague, Czech Republic) studied composition at the Prague Music Academy and at the Paris Conservatoire. Adámek is currently (2010-2011) a guest of the Berlin Artists‘ Programme of the DAAD and it also composing a new work for the Ensemble Intercontemporain (Paris), which will be premièred in 2013.
In 2002 he was awarded a UNESCO grant for the production ‘Abila’, which was created in collaboration with the Gaara dance company in Nairobi. He has been commissioned to create works for, among others, the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, Les Musique and Warsaw Autumn as well as for the Vienna Klangforum, the Orchestre National d'Île de France and the Brandenburger Sinfoniker.
He has won many prizes, including the Prix de Bourges, the Prix Métamorphoses (Belgium) the Hungarian Radio Prize (2004) and the Composer’s Prize at the second Brandenburg Biennial in 2006, the Prix de la SACEM (2009) and the Grand Prix Tansman (2010).
Adámek’s works combine elements of orchestral, chamber and vocal music with electro-acoustic music, frequently in collaboration with contemporary dance choreographers. Adámek entrances his listeners with a colourful tonic language which combines contemporary music with elements from Japanese, Balinese or Andalusian or other foreign cultures, giving this heterogeneous musical material a clear form of expression.  
Works (selection):
Chambrenôise (2010)
Nôise (2009)
Dusty Rusty Hush (2006-2007)
Strange Night in Daylight (2002-2004)  

Mark Barden

Mark Barden (born 1980 in Cleveland, Ohio, USA) has lived and worked as a composer in Europe since 2004. He moved to Europe after completing his bachelor’s degree in composition, studying with Lewis Nielson and Randolph Coleman, and piano, studying with Monique Duphil, and took a masters’ degree at the Freiburg Music Academy. He has also taken additional private lessons and participated in master classes with Brian Ferneyhough, Helmut Lachenmann, Mark Andre and others.
His current projects include commissions for the Donaueschingen Days of Music, the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Berlin Senate and the ensemble recherche and the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra.
He has been awarded a Scholarship Prize for the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and three-year PhD Studentship at Goldsmiths College in London and is a 2010-2011 Fellow of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin. He currently lives in Freiburg and London.
His compositions belong primarily to the area of traditional concert music and performance installations. They frequently incorporate a structural flexibility that allows them to react to the acoustic, architectural and atmospheric conditions prevailing in the places in which they are performed.
For the e.poesie concert evening, Barden is creating with the architecture of the Academy of the Arts a common context for the composition and the poems of Zakaria Mohammed. The two levels can be perceived as two units side-by-side and yet in poetic contact.
Works (selection):
Anatomy (2010)
gauze I & II (2009–2010)
Unterdruck (2008)
kairos incised (2007)

Eliav Brand

Eliav Brand (born 1968 in Tel Aviv, Israel) studied composition with Joseph Dorfman at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv and has worked with David Felder, Cort Lippe and Walter Zimmermann.
As well as chamber music compositions, Brand’s work also includes interdisciplinary projects, mostly as collaborations with writers, video artists and architects. His works have been presented at international festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses, the Eclat Festival Neue Musik Stuttgart  and the June in Buffalo-Festival, and performed by, for example, the New York Music Ensemble, the Ensemble SurPlus and the Ensemble Intercontemporain.
Brand has received several scholarships and prizes, from, among others, the Schloss Solitude Academy, the Research Foundation of the State University of New York and from the Minerva Foundation of the Max Planck Society.
Brand has taught composition at Buffalo State College and the State University of New York in Buffalo. He has also curated concerts of contemporary music for the Malchinim Menagnim Festival in Israel. He has lived in Germany since 2001.
Brand’s are ironically disrespectful of ideologies, unreflected opinions and dogmas. They make a space for themselves that permits humour, idiosyncrasy and sensitivity.
From his close and mutual collaboration with the poet Michael Stauffer, compositions have been created for the 2011 poesiefestival berlin that focus on both the sound and communicative elements of language, revealing the tensions between them, especially in modern day-to-day life.
Works (selection):
Kinim (1998)
Libera Me: a'in, oh my god! (2006)
Hairy, Breathy, Sweaty: Episodes from String Life (2007/2008) 

Rozalie Hirs

Rozalie Hirs (born 1965 in Gouda, the Netherlands) studied composition with Diderik Wagenaar, Louis Andriessen and Clarence Barlow and classical singing at the Royal Conservatoire after gaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering.
As well as a composer, she is also a poet. Her poems were first published in the literary magazine De Revisor in 1992, and collections started appearing shortly thereafter. Hirs has won numerous fellowships and prizes both for her musical compositions and for her poetry, including the Flemish Literary Fund, a Fulbright Fellowship, the Rapaport Composition Prize, a Fellowship from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds and research fellowships from the Amsterdam School of the Arts.
Hirs’ compositions have strong electro-acoustic elements and entrance audiences with their aural colour and diversity of sounds. She manages to form a whole orchestra into a musical unit which is then seen as a pulsing wholeness, with her fascination with the acoustic and psycho-acoustic qualities of sound and its colouration being clearly discernible. The electro-acoustic medium is the field, however, in which Hirs‘ two artistic languages, poetry and composition, meet most directly. Listeners are invited to enter the inner life of sounds and words, even, indeed, to let themselves be embraced by the presence of the performance.
In 2004, Rozalie Hirs was a fellow of the Young Academy of the Academy of the Arts.      
Works (selection):
Venus (2010)
Roseherte (2007-08)
For morton feldman (2002)
Sacro Monte (1997)  
Publications (selection):
Geluksbrenger (2008)
Speling (2005)
Logos (2002)
Locus (1998)

Rozalie Hirs im ZVAB

Dmitri Kourliandski

Dmitri Kourliandsky (born 1976 in Moscow, Russia) attended master classes by Russian and international composers after graduating from the Moscow Conservatoire and studying for a doctorate with Leonid Bobylev.
His works are played regularly at festivals and concerts throughout the world in countries such as Finland, Russia, Germany, Japan, Argentina and Canada. He has already worked with conductors such as Roland Kluttig, Teodor Currentzis and Giorgio Bernasconi.
International prizes Kourliandski has won include the 2003 Grand Prix of the International Gaudeamus Competition (Netherlands) and the 2010 Gianni Bergamo Classic Music Award (Switzerland).
In 2008 he was a guest of the Berlin Artists’ Programme of theDAAD. Kourliandski himself describes his compositions as objective music containing no dramatic plot. Radical in their form and calculated aurality, they are uncompromising in the clarity of their ideas and have an unmistakeable feeling for musical expression in the most minimalist space. Using extremely reduced sound material frequently very close to pure noise, his works engender a concentration that draws the listener’s attention to even the smallest details.  
Works (selection):
Wireless technologies (2011)
Shiver (2010)
Dissecta... still life (2007)
Broken memory (2005)  

Stanislaw Lwowski

Stanislav Lvovsky (born 1972 in Moscow, Russia) worked in advertising and as a journalist after taking a degree in chemistry. He subsequently took up his present career as a culture manager. He was a co-founder of the literary group Vavilon and editor-in-chief of the literature section of Openspace.ru.
He published his first collection of verse in 1996. As well as poems, he also writes prose, short stories and plays and has translated such writers as Leonard Cohen from English into Russian. His own works have been translated into and published in English, French, Georgian, Chinese and Italian. His cycle ‘wireless technologies’ is about wireless technology which shrinks distances, transforms spaces and compresses time. Letters, words and groups of words are taken from his texts and transformed into music by Dmitri Kourliandski.
Lvovsky has received prizes from the Moscow Free Verse Festival and for the best poetry of the year at the Moskovskii Schyot. He has also been nominated for many other prizes such as the Andrey Bely Literature Prize.  
Publications (selection):
A Word on Flowers and Dogs (2003)
Poems about the Motherland (2004)
Camera Rostrum (2008)  

Zakaria Mohammed

Zakaria Mohammed (born 1950 in Nablus, Palestine) returned to his homeland in 1994 after 25 years in exile, and now lives in Ramallah. He is a freelance journalist, editor, and writer of prose and poetry. For many years he was the deputy editor of Mahmud Darwish’s cultural journal al-Karmel.
As a poet, he is a master of concision. Constantly searching for what is absolutely essential, he consistently throws all the unnecessary ballast of ideas and language overboard in the process of writing, until he gets through to the core of the matter. As he says, “It isn’t what’s written that makes the poem, but what is left out.” It is a matter for him of achieving silence.
Mohammed weaves unspectacular everyday moments together with philosophical considerations into poetic texts of great intensity and compression, the characteristic style of which is gentle and sensual in tone. His works are reminiscent of still lifes which radiate a meditative calm and invite the reader to pause, be silent and reflect.
Publications (selection):
Qasâ’id akhîra (letzte Gedichte), Palästinensischer Schriftstellerverband, Beirut 1981.
Aschghâl yadawîyya (Handarbeit), Dâr ar-Rayyes, London 1990.
Al-Djawâd yadjtazu Üsküdar (Das Pferd passiert Üsküdar), Dâr surâh, London 1994.
Darbat schams (Sonnenstich), al-mu’assasa al-arabîyya li-d-dirâsât wa-n-naschr, Beirut 2002.
Hadjar al-baht (Zauberstein), Dâr an-nâschir, Ramallah 2008.

Sjón

Sjón (born 1962in Reykjavík, Iceland) is one of Iceland’s most versatile artists. He was only 15 whaen he published his first book of poems, which has since been followed by eleven more.
Sjón’s literary poetry and novels have been translated into twenty different languages, with a selection of his poems in English, Night of the Lemon, being published in 1993 by Greyhound Press and his novel The Blue Fox (Skugga Baldur) winning the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize in 2005 and being nominated for the Jan Michelski Prize for Literature in 2011 and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize in 2009.
He also writes opera libretti, plays and screenplays. But in the area of film, Sjón is not only a writer of screenplays but also writes song lyrics, including for ‘Dancer in the Dark’ by Lars von Trier, which earned him an Oscar nomination. For Björk, who played the lead role in that film, he had already written many songs such as ‘Bachelorette’ on the album Homogenic (1997) and ‘Wanderlust’ on the album Volta (2007).
He has been a musician himself under the pseudonym of Johnny Triumph, releasing the song ‘Luftgitar’ (air guitar) with the Icelandic band The Sugarcubes, of which Björk was a member.
His artistic work also includes performance art: he was a member of the performance group ‘Medusa‘ in the 1980s, which was predominantly influenced by Surrealism. The range of Sjón’s creative work makes him a unique artist, whose creativity seems to know no bounds.  
Publications (selection):
Stálnótt (1987)
Myrkar fígúrur (1998)
söngur steinasafnarans (2007)
ljóðasafn 1978 - 2008 (anthology) (2008)

Michael Stauffer

Michael Stauffer’s (born 1972 in Winterthur, Switzerland) first novel, I promise when the sun comes up – I promise, I’ll be true (2001)was awarded the Book Prize of the Canton of Berne and the Hermann Ganz Prize of the Swiss Writers’ Association. Stauffer’s work includes not only prose works but also poetry, plays, radio plays and Spoken Word performances. He currently lives in Biel (Bienne) and publishes internationally-acclaimed poetry, prose, radio plays, performances, plays, sings and improvises in Europe.
In his prose works he uses an idiosyncratic technique combining ironic descriptions of everyday life with surrealistic elements. The bounds of his curiosity are minimal.
He experiments and works with language, constantly attempting to entice it away from the written word, or following a mouth until it writes. Michael Stauffer shares his knowledge and experience with students of the Swiss Literature Institute at the Berne Academy of the Arts, where he has a small professorship.
Michael Stauffer has been a member of the Association of Authors of Switzerland since 2003.
Publications (selection):
2010 Kleine Menschen with Nora Gomringer
2010 Der gesunde Menschenversand, Lucerne
2010 Hinduhans
2010 Ich begrüsse mich ganz herzlich für DRS
2008 Stauffer an Krüsi antworten
Michael Stauffer im ZVAB