BIOS:

Richard Barrett (GB) computer and electronics, composition
Richard Barrett (*1959) studied composition principally with Peter Wiegold. He has taught electronic composition and performance at the Institute of Sonology in Den Haag and currently holds a professorship at Brunel University in London. His work encompasses both notated composition and improvisation, ranging from chamber and orchestral music to innovative uses of live electronics and collaborations with visual artists. He has performed with Paul Obermayer in the electronic duo FURT since 1986, which since 2005 has also been expanded into the octet fORCH. He also works regularly with improvising musicians such as Evan Parker and Ute Wassermann, and numerous ensembles including long-term collaborations with Elision and Champ d'Action. He is currently working on a commission from the Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
www.furtlogic.com

Carola Bauckholt (D)
1959 born in Krefeld 1976-84 she worked at the Theater am Marienplatz in Krefeld 1978-84 studied at the Cologne Musikhochschule with Mauricio Kagel 1985 she co-founded Thürmchen publishers and 1991 the Thürmchen Ensemble She has received composition prizes at the following competitions: Young Composers of North Rhine-Westphalia, B. A. Zimmermann Today, Bernd Alois Zimmermann Grant from the City of Cologne, World Music Days (1987), Cologne-New York Exchange (1989), West German Radio Competition (1989), Carl Maria von Weber Competition (Dresden 1992/3), Gedok International Orchestral Competition (1994), Stuttgart Composers' Competition (second prize) and Boswil International Composers' Competition (second prize). She was also chosen for the World Music Days in Copenhagen (1996) and Seoul (1997) and for the Blaue Brücke in Dresden (1996). 1990/91 Schloss Solitude Academy Scholarship in Stuttgart 1992 Schreyahn Artists' Colony Scholarship in Lower Saxony 1995 a grant-in-aid from the North Rhine Westphalian Foundation for Art and Culture 1997 Villa Massimo Scholarship in Rom 1998 Female Artists' Prize of North Rhine-Westphalia 2008 Star of the week Münchener Abendzeitung 2008 chosen from Internationalen Theater Instituts for Music Theater NOW The main focus of Carola Bauckholt's music falls on thinking about the phenomenon of perception and understanding.
www.carolabauckholt.de

Björn Gottstein (D) Music theoretician and journalist
Björn Gottstein (*1967) is a music theoretician and journalist from Berlin. His specialised fields are modern, avant-garde and electronic music. He presents regular new music shows for the German radio station Westdeutschen Rundfunk for whom he also took care of live  improvised studio concerts from 2006 to 2008. On top of this he has realised music features for Bayrischen Rundfunk (Bavarian Radio), Südwestrundfunk (South West), Hessen Rundfunk and Deutschlandradio Kultur (National Cultural Radio Station). He works as a critic for the taz newspaper and has released journals and reviews in the Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik, MusikTexten as well as international publications such as Dissonanz (Basel), Parergon (Oslo), Nutida Musik (Stockholm) and Accents (Paris). He has been on the editorial board of   Positionen music magazine since 2005. His book „Musik als Ars Scientia“ appeared in 2006 through the publishers Pfau.
www.geraeuschen.de

Elisabeth Harnik (AT) Piano
Elisabeth Harnik was born in 1970 in Graz. She first studied classical piano. After working at instrumental and vocal improvisation she began her professional career as a pianist and singer by interpreting her own compositions and performing in various forms of improvised music.
She then studied composition and Music theory with Beat Furrer at the University of Music and dramatic Art in Graz and in 2006 received her master´s degree with distinction.
Her compositions (chamber-music, ensemble-music, music for theatre) have been performed regularly, notably at the Graz Easter Festival 2002, the Styrian Chamber Music Festival 2003, the Hörfest Graz 2003/04/05 and as part of the Vienna Mozart Year 2006 and the Haydn Year 2009. Her first Opera-project “Kugelstein” (Libretto: Olga Flor) has recently been performed at the Opera House Graz.
In addition to her work as a composer Elisabeth Harnik has performed piano improvisations at national and international festivals (e.g. International Piano Music Festival, Vilnius; Ulrichsberger Kaleidophon; Piano Festival Soundgrube, Vienna; Musicacoustica, Beijing; Beethoven Festival, Bonn; Festival Open Ears, Munich; Konfrontationen Nickelsdorf; Festival Artacts, St. Johann; Umbrella Music Festival, Chicago a.o.).
Besides her solo performances (cd “irrt, irrt das ohr” Extraplatte 2005) she is member of many ensembles for improvised music.
The city of Graz awarded her the Music Promotion Prize in 2005. In 2006 this was followed by a grant from the Federal Chancellery. In 2007 she was the official holder of the Austrian State grant for compostion and the Styrian Andrzej-Dobrowolski grand.
www.elisabeth-harnik.at

Lê Quan Ninh (FR) percussion
As a classical trained percussionist, Lê Quan Ninh worked with contemporary music ensembles and is a founder member of Quatuor Hêlios, a percussion quartet that performed and recorded, among others, John Cage's percussion works. Their last creation is Seul à Seuls by Georges Aperghis premiered in late 2006 at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg (France).
As an improvisor, he participates at numerous meetings in Europe and in North America and plays regularly in ensembles in forms that mix improvised acoustic & electroacoustic music, 'performance art', dance, poetry, experimental cinema, photography and video...
With the cellist Martine Altenburger, he founded in 2006 the ensemble]h[iatus, a contemporary music ensemble whose its members are at the same time interpreters and improvisers. They commissioned a piece to the composer Vinko Globokar that will be premiered in September 2009.
He works regularly with dancers. One of the last projects is Delay vs Trio, a piece using computers with the dancers Franck Beaubois and Patricia Kuypers where a movie is 'built' step by step on the spot. Ninh currently works with the choreographer Clara Cornil for (H)AND(S) a piece for 3 dancers and 2 musicians that will be premiered in February 2009.
His discography counts about 30 CD on european and north american labels.
www.lequanninh.net

Anton Lukoszevieze (GB) cello
Cellist Anton Lukoszevieze is one of the most diverse performers of his generation and is notable for his performances of avant-garde, experimental and improvised music. Anton has given many performances at numerous international festivals throughout Europe and the USA (Maerzmusik, Donaueschingen, Wien Modern, GAS, Transart, Ultima, etc.etc.). He has also made frequent programmes and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3, Danish Radio, SR2, Sweden, Deutschland Rundfunk, WDR, Germany and ORT, Austria. Deutschlandfunk, Berlin produced a radio portrait of him in September, 2003. Anton has also performed concerti with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the 2001 Aldeburgh festival and the Netherlands Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has collaborated with many composers and performers including David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, Amnon Wolman, Pierre Strauch, Rytis Mazulis, Karlheinz Essl, Helmut Oehring, Christopher Fox, Philip Corner, Alvin Curran, Phill Niblock and Laurence Crane. He is unique in the UK through his use of the curved bow (BACH-Bogen), which he is using to develop new repertoire for the cello. From 2005-7 he was New Music Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge and Kettle’s Yard Gallery. Anton is the subject of four films (FoxFire Eins) by the renowned artist-filmmaker Jayne Parker. A new film Trilogy with compositions by Sylvano Bussotti, George Aperghis and Laurence Crane premieres at The London Film Festival, October 2008. In November will premiere a new hour long work by Christopher Fox for cello and the vocal ensemble Exaudi commissioned by the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and will also present new solo works for cello and live electronics. Anton is also active as an artist, his work has been shown in Holland (Lux Nijmegen), CAC, Vilnius, Duisburg (EarPort), Austria, (Sammlung Essl), Wien Modern, The Slade School of Art, Kettle’s Yard Gallery, Cambridge Film Festival and Rational Rec. London. His work has been published in Musiktexte, Cologne, design Magazine and the book SoundVisions (Pfau-Verlag, Saarbrucken, 2005). Anton Lukoszevieze is founder and director of the ensemble Apartment House, a member of the radical noise group Zeitkratzer and recently made his contemporary dance debut with the Vincent Dance Company in Broken Chords, Dusseldorf.
www.myspace.com/antonlukoszevieze

Christian Pfeiffer (D)
Christian Philipp Pfeiffer, born 1984 in Filderstadt, studied at the Academy of Music in Stuttgart from 2004. From 2005 he specialised in violoncello. He is a tutor at the Institute for Music Theory & Composition. From 2006 he solidified his interest in contemporary music through composition by training with Caspar Johannes Walter. He is highly active as a cellist in various chamber music projects from trios to octets as well as with the Ensemble musica viva Stuttgart.

Melvyn Poore (D) Tuba
Melvyn Poore has worked in various situations as tubist, improviser, composer, sound designer and sound diffuser, researcher in Computer Music, computer programmer, recording engineer. Born in England, educated at the University of Birmingham, he moved to Germany in 1991, at first working on his own performance practice projects at the Centre for Art and Media Technolgy ( ZKM) Karlsruhe. He has been active for over 25 years in both the improvised music and New Music scenes: one of his main artistic contributions being the integration of live electronics with acoustic instruments.
He has travelled far and wide throughout Europe, the United States and Australia, performing, broadcasting, teaching, leading workshops in schools, on beaches and street corners, in canteens, colleges, clubs, castles and even in concert halls. Through his co-operation with composers he has considerably enlarged the repertoire of the tuba. He played - amongst others - with Barry Guy’s London Jazz Composers Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Radu Malfatti’s “Ohr Kiste”, the Cambrian and the Fine Arts Brass Quintets; he continues to be a member of the MusikFabrik NRW, Reinhold Friedl’s Zeitkratzer, Wolfgang Fuchs’s King Übü Örchestrü.
www.poore.de

Frederic Rzewski (USA/B) piano
Frederic Rzewski (born Westfield, Massachusetts, 1938) studied music first with Charles Mackey of Springfield, and subsequently with Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, and Milton Babbitt at Harvard and Princeton Universities. He went to Italy in 1960, where he studied with Luigi Dallapiccola and met Severino Gazzelloni, with whom he performed in a number of concerts, thus beginning a career as a performer of new piano music. His early friendship with Christian Wolff and David Behrman, and his acquaintance with John Cage and David Tudor, strongly influenced his development in both composition and performance. In Rome in the mid-sixties, together with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum, he formed the MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva) group, which quickly became known for its pioneering work in live electronics and improvisation. Bringing together both classical and jazz avant-gardists (like Steve Lacy and Anthony Braxton), MEV developed an esthetic of music as a spontaneous collective process. The experience of MEV can be felt in Frederic Rzewski's compositions of the late sixties and early seventies, which combine elements derived equally from the worlds of written and improvised music. During the seventies he experimented further with forms in which style and language are treated as structural elements; the best-known work of this period is The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, a 50-minute set of piano variations. A number of pieces for larger ensembles written between 1979 and 1981 show a return to experimental and graphic notation, while much of the work of the eighties explores new ways of using twelve-tone technique. A freer, more spontaneous approach to writing can be found in more recent work. His largest-scale work to date is The Triumph of Death (1987-8), a two-hour oratorio based on texts adapted from Peter Weiss' 1965 play Die Ermittlung (The Investigation). Since 1983, he has been Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liege, Belgium.
www.kcstudio.com/rzewski2.html

Burkhard Stangl (AT) guitar
*1960, composer/performer, guitar, electronic devices
works in the field of non-ideomatic improvisation, electronica and contemporary classical. studies: classical guitar; electric guitar (autodidacted); cultural anthropology, musicology (thesis about the effects of the phonograph on cultural anthropology [book: Ethnologie im Ohr]). long term guitar-player at Franz Koglmann’s projects (Monoblue Quartet, Pipetet); founder of the ensembles Ton.Art (advanced jazz /1985-1995), Maxixe (new music chamber ensemble / 1991 ff.) and Extended Heritage (Butcher/Castelló/Dieb13/Reiter/Roisz/Stangl /2006); member of polwechsel (1993-2004), efzeg and the year of. solo-works (Récital 1/1996, Récital 2/2006, Récital 3/2007) duos with Christof Kurzmann (Schnee), Taku Unami (i was), Taku Sugimoto (an oldfashioned duett), Angélica Castelló (pas de raison) and Kai Fagaschinski trio with Dieb 13 & Billy Roisz (EH) quartet with Dieb 13, Billy Roisz & Angélica Castelló (CastEHllo) compositions for choir, piano, chamber music (a.o. for Maxixe, Klangforum Wien); opera-project moon of Venus (1997-2002) together with the poet Oswald Egger. music for films, gustav deutsch: film.ist 7-12 (together with siewert/fennesz/dafeldecker) welt.spiegel.kino (with fennesz) CDs: all together more than 50 CD-releases. concerts and festivals in europe, america, asia and africa.
lives and works in vienna.
http://stangl.klingt.org

Roger Turner (GB) Schlagzeug, Perkussion
grew up amongst the canterbury musical life of the 1960Õs with a strong jazz foundation. since 1974 work has been concentrated on exploring a more personal percussion language through the processes of improvisation. solo work, collaborations with experimental rock musics & open - form song, extensive work with dance, film and photo-projection, involvements in numerous jazz-based ensembles, & workshop residencies have formed part of that development. mostly, however, the pleasures & discoveries have been in music-making with many of the finest european & international musicians in ad hoc & group improvising collaborations. tours & concerts have been throughout europe, australia, canada, u.s.a., mexico, china and japan. working currently in konk pack ( with tim hodgkinson & thomas lehn), duo w/ annette peacock, the recedents ( with lol coxhill & mike cooper),the phil minton quartet,the duos with john russell, phil minton...etc. numerous recordings.......
www.efi.group.shef.ac.uk/mturner.html

Jennifer Walshe (IR / USA) Stimme
Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1974. She studied composition with John Maxwell Geddes at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Kevin Volans in Dublin and graduated from Northwestern University, Chicago, with a doctoral degree in composition in June 2002. Her chief teachers at Northwestern were Amnon Wolman and Michael Pisaro. In 2003-2004 Jennifer was a fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; during 2004-2005 she lived in Berlin as a guest of the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm. From 2006 to 2008 she is the composer-in-residence in South Dublin County for In Context 3. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York. In 2008 she was awarded the Praetorius Music Prize for Composition by the Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur.
In addition to her activities as a composer, Jennifer frequently performs as a vocalist, specialising in extended techniques. Many of her recent compositions were commissioned for her voice in conjunction with other instruments, and her works have been performed by her and others at festivals such as Ultraschall (Berlin), Ars Musica (Brussels), Steirischer Herbst, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Donaueschinger Musiktagen, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt, Frau Musica Nova (Cologne), a.m.o.
Jennifer is also active as an improviser, performing regularly with musicians in Europe and the U.S. .
Recent projects of note include Physics for the Girl in the Street, a music theatre work commissioned by the Maerzmusik Festival, Berlin, performed by Jennifer Walshe and the Schlagquartett Köln in Berlin, Wiesbaden and Cologne; My Extensive Relationship with Mr. Stephen Patrick M., a piece for ensemble commissioned by Wien Modern, performed by Jennifer Walshe and Apartment House in the Sammlung Essl, Austria; and Grove of Drift, a sound installation commissioned by the Project Arts Centre, Dublin, exhibited in the Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, and the Project Arts Centre.
www.milker.org

Thürmchen Ensemble
The Thürmchen Ensemble, founded 1991 in Cologne by the composers Carola Bauckholt, Caspar Johannes Walter and Roland Kluttig, practices contemporary, experimental music. Their preference for works which are aesthetically individual and conquer new ground in composition is documented in upwards of eighty world premieres and numerous German premieres over the last few years as well as CD productions. The Thürmchen Ensemble specifically aims at supporting international composers who have previously not attained much public attention.
www.thuermchen.de

Dorothea Eppendorf (D) Piano
The Cologne based pianist Dorothea Eppendorf has dedicated herself to a classical/romantic repertoire as well as intensively occupying herself with contemporary music. Her work is documented on numerous CDs and session recordings for radio. She has also taken part in many world premieres and played at festivals such as the Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspielen, the Dresdener Musikfestspielen, the Wittener Tagen für Neue Musik, in Donau-Eschingen and at Warschauer Herbst. She regularly plays concerts in Germany as well as abroad. Dorothea Eppendorf studied in Berlin, Hannover and with David Levine's masterclass in DŸsseldorf. Having won a scholarship from the Fondation les Treilles in France she was also a pupil of Claude Helffer.
She received among others the sponsorship award from the state of NRW (West Germany), won first place in the national youth music competition and won the GEDOK prize. Dorothea Eppendorf is lecturer at the Academy of Music in Cologne as well as at the Folkwang Academy in Essen.
www.thuermchen.de

Diego Montes (AR/D) clarinet
born 1958 in Cordoba, Argentina, studied clarinet at the Conservatory in Cordoba and at the Academy in Essen. His concert activities take in the fields of new music - e.g. as a member of the WNC Ensembles, the Thürmchen Ensembles and the Alea Ensembles - and performances of early historical music, for example with the Musiciens de Louvre and Concerto Köln.
www.thuermchen.de

Caspar Johannes Walter (D) cello
was born in Frankfurt/Main in 1964. He studied composition with V. D. Kirchner (Wiesbaden) as well as with J. Fritsch and C. Barlow (Cologne Conservatory of Music, 1985-90). In 1985 he was cofounder of the Cologne-based Thürmchen Verlag (Publishing House). He has received several major composition awards including the first prize in the Stuttgart Composition Competition (1991), the 13th Irino Prize for Orchestra (Japan, 1992), in 1995 the first prize in the competition »Vienna modern«, the Hindemith Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival and from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia the award for most promising in the category music. In 1988, he was awarded the same by the City of Cologne. He received a scholarship in 1995/96 at the Künstlerhof Schreyahn (Artists' Colony), Lower Saxony, and in 1998 he has been granted a fellowship to carry out his work at the Villa Massimo in Rome. He has represented the young generation of Cologne musicians in exchange projects sponsored by the Goethe Institut in New York (1989) and Atlanta (1993). His pieces were selected for the World Music Days in Stockholm in 1994 and in Copenhagen in 1996. A CD with chamber music works by Caspar Johannes Walter released by the German Council of Music on the Label Wergo has been awarded the »Preis der deutschen Schallplattenkritik« in 1998.
His interests as an interpreter -he is cellist in the Thürmchen Ensemble, which he also co-founded in 1991- are focused primarily on young composers from the areas of experimental music and musical theatre. Caspar Johannes Walter's works are performed regularly, not only in Europe but also very successfully in the USA and Japan, for example 1993 World Premieres in Atlanta and Tokyo.
www.thuermchen.de