IMPULS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Coach
- Director of the Bludenzer Tage
- Resident Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm Des DAAD
Iannotta has been a resident fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD in 2013, Villa Médicis (Académie de France à Rome) in 2018-19, and the recipient of several prizes including the Ernst von Siemens Composers' Prize and Hindemith-Preis 2018, Una Vita nella Musica - Giovani 2019 and Premio Abbiati 2021, as well as Bestenliste 2/2016 der deutschen Schallplattenkritik for her first portrait CD A Failed Entertainment.
Since 2014, Iannotta has been the artistic director of the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, since 2022 also the co-artistic director of the Festival Klangspuren Schwaz.
Davide Gagliardi (*1988) is a composer, performer, electronic musician and sound director specialised in the interpretation of electroacoustic music. His works are the result of a continuous research applied to the development of relationships between acoustic and digital musical environments. His repertoire includes a variety of acousmatic pieces, live electronics performances for solo instruments, ensembles and musical theatre experiences. His artistic research is oriented towards the realisation of dynamic systems of mutual human-machine inter-action based on machine listening algorithms and complex feedback networks.
During his career he has collaborated with numerous artists and ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Marco Fusi, Karin Hellqvist, Mauro Lanza, Pierluigi Billone, Ensemble Prometeo, Quartetto Maurice, Agostino di Scipio, the Black Page Orchestra, Hannes Kerschbaumer and Marko Ciciliani, participating in various festivals such as Gaudeamus Muziekweek (NL), Donaueschinger-Musiktage, Darmstädter Ferienkurse (DE), Wien Modern, Klangspuren, impuls, Elevate, Jeunesse, Signale (AT), la Biennale di Venezia (IT), Afekt (EST), Time of Music (FI), BEASTFeaST(UK), and GLOBALE: next_generation (DE) among others.
Graduated in Computer Music at the Institute für Elektronische Musik Graz and the Conservatory of Venice, he worked as director of the Studio für elektronische Musik at the HfMDK in Frankfurt and is currently professor of Multimedia at the Conservatorio G. Verdi in Milan. Since 2016 he is the sound director of the Schallfeld Ensemble.
Dimitrios Polisoidis was born in Thessaloniki, Greece in 1961. He studied the violin with Dany Dossiou in his home town and later attended the University of Music Graz where he studied with Christos Poyzoides and also studied the viola with Herbert Blendinger.
From 1990 to 1993 he was the principal viola player of the Philharmonic Orchestra Graz, and in 1993 became a member of Klangforum Wien.
Dimitrios Polisoidis has devoted himself mainly to new music and to performing with experimental improvisation groups. He was an artistic collaborator in several live electronic projects at the Electronic Institute of the University of Music Graz, (IEM Graz). He has performed internationally and worked with many renowned composers such as Peter Ablinger, Georg Friedrich Haas, Bernhard Lang, Klaus Lang, Gösta Neuwirth, Olga Neuwirth, and George Lopez, who wrote works especially for him.
In 2012, the federal state of Styria awarded him the "Karl Böhm Interpreter's Prize." He teaches at the University of Music Graz and at the impuls Academy as well as at the International Summer Courses in Darmstadt.
Gerhard Eckel uses sound to explore unconventional ways of world making. He aims at articulating aesthetic and epistemic forms of listening, engaging all senses. His works are the result of research processes drawing on the practice and theory of music composition, sound art, choreography and dance, installation art, interaction design and digital instrument making. Gerhard works as professor of Computer Music and Multimedia at the Institute of Electronic Music and Acoustics of the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz. He also serves as affiliated professor at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
Besides his artistic work and teaching, he directs publicly funded transdisciplinary research projects and supervises scientific, scholarly, and artistic doctoral research.
Rosenberger is a recipient of the 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship. In the past, she has been awarded with the Hellman Fellowship, San Francisco, the Sony Scholar Award, and the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Commission for her composition "Gesang an das noch namenlose Land". Her installation work "VIVA VOCE" and "Room V" won the "Mediaprojects Award" / Sitemapping of the Swiss Federal Agency (OFC), Berne. Her portrait CD "TEXTUREN" with the Wet Ink Ensemble, released on HatHut Records, has been awarded the prestigious Copland Recording Grant and was selected for the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, Bestenliste 4_2012.
Klaus Lang (*1971 Graz / Austria) lives in Steirisch Lassnitz (Austria). He studied composition and theory of music (with H.M. Preßl, B. Furrer and Y. Pagh-Paan) and organ. Klaus Lang loves tea and dislikes lawnmowers and Richard Wagner. Klaus Lang's music is not a means to convey extramusical contents, such as emotions, philosophical or religious ideas, political propaganda, advertisement etc. His music is no language used to communicate non-musical content. Music is seen as a free and selfstanding acoustical object. In his work he is not using sound, sound is explored and given the opportunity to unfold its inherent rich beauties. Only when sound is just sound it is percievable as that what it really is: a temporal phenomenon - audible time. Klaus Lang sees time as the genuine material of a composer and at the same time also the fundamental content of music. In his view musical material is time perceived through sound, the object of music is the experience of time through listening. Music is time made audible.
Klaus Lang has received commissions from numerous renowned festivals for new music such as steirischer herbst, Wien Modern, IMD Darmstadt, Eclat Stuttgart, Maerzmusik Berlin, Osterklang Innsbruck, Tage zeitgemäßer Musik Bludenz, Musikmonat Basel, Takefu Festival (Japan), Lucerne Festival and Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik. He has written music theater works for the Bonn Opera, the Tyrolean Landestheater, the Hebbeltheater Berlin, the Theater Aachen and the Munich Biennale, among others. Ensembles such as Klangforum Wien and Ensemble intercontemporain, the Arditti Quartet, choirs of WDR and SWR and many others have performed works by him.
In addition to his work as a composer, he performs as an organist with old, new and improvised music and has published numerous articles in music journals. Since 2006 he has held a professorship at the University of Music in Graz for composition and is also repeatedly active as a lecturer at impuls and the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, among others.
Lucia Ronchetti has frequently been composer in residence: Villa Concordia, Bamberg; Studio für elektroakustische Musik, Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Schlossmediale Werdenberg, Zürich; Yaddo, New York; Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, Berlin; Fulbright scholar program, New York; Staatsoper of Stuttgart; Experimentalstudio des SWR, Freiburg; MacDowell Colony, Boston; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart; Cité internationale des arts, Paris; Fondation Nadia Boulanger, Paris; Fondation des Treilles, Paris.
Ludvig Elblaus is an artist and researcher working primarily with computational materials to create acoustic and electronic music, sound art, audio-visual installations, museum exhibits as well as contributions to collaborative larger works in several traditions, e.g. opera, theatre, and dance.
His artistic practice explores generative tools, complex systems, modelling as an artistic practice, the site-specific, emergence, and experiential aspects of very slow and drawn out temporal structures and deep listening.
In 2022 he was the Artist in Residence at IEM in Graz. He got his PhD in Sound and Music Computing in 2018 at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology with the thesis "Crafting experience: Designing digital musical instruments for long-term use in artistic practice".
Mark Andre was appointed to the Berlin Academy of Arts in 2009. In the same year he was appointed professor of composition at the Dresden University of Music. In 2012, Mark Andre was named a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. In 2012/13 he was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. In 2007 he received the orchestra award of the SWR Orchestra during the Donaueschingen Music Festival for "auf" for orchestra and electronics and in 2015 the orchestra award of the SWR Orchestra during the Donaueschinger Music Festival for "über" for clarinet, orchestra and electronics. In 2017 he received the Hans and Gertrude Zender Prize and the Art and Culture Prize of the Catholic Church, the Episcopal Conference.
Nadir Vassena was born in Lugano (Switzerland). He studied composition in Milan under Bruno Zanolani and in Freiburg im Breisgau under Johannes Schöllhorn.
He has received numerous invitations to renowned festivals for new music and came away with many accolades, examples include the competition organised by the "Westdeutschen Rundfunk" (West German Radio) in Cologne 1992, the Music Institute of the "Hochschule der Künste" (School of Arts) in Berlin 1994 (first prize ex aequo), and the Mozart Competition in Salzburg 1997, he was also awarded the Christoph-Delz Foundation Prize. He was nominated for the Swiss Music Prize 2015. Nadir Vassena, together with Mats Scheidegger, was (2004-2012) director of the "Tage für Neue Musik Zürich".
Nadir Vassena was a scholar of the "Akademie Schloss Solitude" in Stuttgart in 2000/2001 and a member of the Swiss Institute in Rome 2002/2003. He is professor of composition at the "Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana" and associate lecturer at the HSLU (Hochschule Luzern - Musik).
Beat Furrer was born in Schaffhausen (Switzerland) in 1954 and received his first musical training on piano at the Music School there. After moving to Vienna in 1975, he studied conducting with Otmar Suitner and composition with Roman Haubenstock Ramati at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst.
In 1985 he founded the Klangforum Wien, which he directed until 1992, and with which he is still associated as conductor. Commissioned by the Vienna State Opera, he composed his first opera Die Blinden. His second opera Narcissus was premiered in 1994 as part of the Festival steirischer herbst at the Graz Opera. In 1996 he was composer-in-residence at the Lucerne Festival. His music theatre work Begehren was premiered in Graz in 2001, the opera invocation in Zürich in 2003 and the sound theatre piece FAMA in Donaueschingen in 2005. In autumn 1991 Furrer became a full professor of composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Graz. He has been guest professor in composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt from 2006-2009. Together with violinist Ernst Kovacic he founded impuls as an international Ensemble and Composers Academy for Contemporary Music. In 2004 he was awarded the Music Prize of the City of Vienna, and in 2005 became a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2006 for his work FAMA. In 2010 his music theatre Wüstenbuch was premiered in Basel. In 2014 he was awarded with the Great Austrian State Prize. 2018 he received the Ernst-von-Siemens music prize. His opera Violetter Schnee, based on a libretto by Vladimir Sorokin and Händl Klaus, was premiered at Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin in January 2019.
Since the 1980s Beat Furrer has composed a wide range of works, from solo and ensemble music to orchestral and choral works and opera. He is well know for his nuanced exploration of the human voice and its relationship to instrumental sound.
Most heartfelt thanks go to Werner Korn, who developed and implemented the grafic design for impuls from 2008 to 2021, aside from ever so many other, often "unnoticed" contributions, aside from his manifold support as friend at impuls activities over the years. He was always there for us, with me. As long as and wherever he could. With helping hands, with his wit and knowledge, with his heart, integrity, backbone, sense of reality and necessity. And he has of course and in general played a major role in shaping the music and musical scene himself, last but not least with his "echoraum", a homebase not only for musicians, composers, artists, a homebase for awake contemporaries. A home also for me.