Prof. Volker Böhm

Volker Böhm, born in 1971 in Freiburg (D), is a musician, audio designer and programmer. He currently lives and works in Basel. Alongside his teaching commitments at the Electronic Studio of the FHNW Academy of Music, he is heavily involved in various art, music and media projects in a range of fields —New Music, theatre, (sound) installations and electroacoustic improvisation.

Prof. Yaron Deutsch

YARON DEUTSCH (TEL AVIV, 1978) IS A GUITARIST MAINLY ACTIVE IN THE FIELD OF CONTEMPORARY MUSIC. HE IS THE FOUNDER AND ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE CHAMBER QUARTET NIKEL AND A FREQUENT GUEST IN EUROPE'S FINEST GROUPS & ORCHESTRAS DEDICATED TO CONTEMPORARY MUSIC. MOST OFTEN HE PLAYS WITH THE ACCLAIMED KLANGFORUM WIEN & MUSIKFABRIK ENSEMBLES.

AS A SOLOIST HE PERFORMED WITH THE ISRAELI PHILHARMONIC, LOS ANGELES PHILHARMONIC, LUXEMBOURG PHILHARMONIC, LUZERNER SINFONIEORCHESTER, SINFONICA NAZIONALE DELLA RAI (TURIN), SWR SYMPHONIEORCHESTER & THE VIENNA RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA; PLAYING UNDER CONDUCTORS SYLVAIN CAMBERLING, TITUS ENGEL, PETER EÖTVÖS, ZUBIN MEHTA, EMILIO POMÀRICO, PETER RUNDEL AND ILAN VOLKOV TO NAME A FEW. RECORDINGS FEATURING HIS PLAYING ARE AVAILABLE ON COL LEGNO, KAIROS, NEOS, SUB ROSA AND WERGO LABELS.

APART FROM HIS PERFORMATIVE ACTIVITIES, HE IS THE GUITAR TUTOR AT THE DARMSTADT INTERNATIONAL SUMMER COURSES, AS WELL AS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF THE INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL FOR CONTEMPORARY CHAMBER MUSIC IN TEL AVIV - “TZLIL MEUDCAN” (IN HEBREW: “UPDATED TONE”).

Prof. Christian Dierstein

Christian Dierstein has established himself among the most interesting performers in the contempory music of our time. He studied under Bernhard Wulff at the Freiburg Musikhochschule and under Gaston Sylvestre in Paris. He is the winner of numerous competitions and received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Akademie Schloß Solitude, Stuttgart.
He is the percussionist of the ensemble recherche since 1988. Together with Marcus Weiss and Nic Hodges he forms the trio accanto. In addition to his performances of new music, he has focused on non-European music and free improvisation.
He has given solo concerts throughout Europe. In the season 2010/11 he was one of the Rising Stars from the European Concert Hall Organisation. Important appearances include: Amsterdam Concertgebouw, Athens , Berliner Festspiele, Brussel Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Huddersfield Festival, Lucerne Festival, Monday evening concerts Los Angeles, Rachmaninov Hall Moskau, Festival d'Autome Paris, Ircam Paris, Rome, Salzburg Festival, Schleswig Holstein Festival, Suntory Hall Tokyo, Wien Modern, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, Zürich Festival für neue Musik and others.
He has recorded for several labels including Kairos, col legno, Stradivarius, Winter & Winter, neon and his recordings have been the recipients of numerous awards.
Christian Dierstein works together regulary with several of the greatest living composers, figures such as Hans Abrahamsen, Beat Furrer, Hugues Dufourt, Helmut Lachenmann, Rebecca Saunders, Salvatore Sciarrino.
Since 2001 he is Professor for percussion and new chamber music at the Hochschule für Musik in Basel, Switzerland.
He gave masterclasses in Buenos Aires, Berlin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Genf, Madrid, Moskau, New York, Oslo, Peking, Valencia,Tiflis and others. Since 2008 he is one of the percussion tutor of the Darmstädter summer courses, since 2011 he is the percussion tutor of the Impuls academy in Graz, since 2014 regular guest teacher in Madrid and 2017 tutor of the Luzern academy.

Prof. Dr. Moritz Heffter

Moritz Heffter studied music theory and school music at the Freiburg University of Music (D) and Latin at Albert Ludwig University, Freiburg (D).

He has been a member of the academic staff of the Freiburg University of Music since 2012. The subject of his PhD thesis was 17th century music theory, in particular early triad concepts, and specifically the triga harmonica concept developed by Henricus Baryphonus. Prof. Heffter previously taught at the Institute for Early Music at the Trossingen University of Music, the HfK Bremen, the Department of Musicology at the Freiburg University of Music, and the HfM Karlsruhe.

The focus of his current work is the digital humanities, specifically the development and refinement of tools for use in both research and teaching. In recent years, a number of apps have been created which aim to support and supplement music theory teaching.

Prof. Heffter conducts and sings with a number of choral ensembles.

Prof. Johannes Kreidler

Johannes Kreidler (1980) studied composition, electronic music and music theory in Freiburg (D) and The Hague, under leading lights like Mathias Spahlinger and Orm Finnendahl. In 2012 he won the Kranichstein Music Prize awarded by the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik [Darmstadt Summer University for New Music]. In 2019 he joined the FHNW Academy of Music in Basel as a professor of Composition.

Performances (selected): Donaueschinger Musiktage, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Ultraschall Berlin, MaerzMusik Berlin, Foreign Affairs Berlin, Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Eclat Stuttgart, La Biennale di Veneziag, Gaudeamus Music Week Amsterdam, Warschauer Herbst, Biennale de Musique en Scène Lyon, Ultima Festival Oslo, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Musica Straßburg, MusicAcoustica Festival Peking, Liquid Architecture Melbourne

Publications: Musik mit Musik – Texte 2005-2011, and Sätze über musikalische Konzeptkunst. Texte 2012-2018

Dr. Anne-May Krüger

Anne-May Krüger’s work is marked by its variety and scope, both on and behind the stage. The mezzo-soprano has appeared internationally as an acclaimed performer especially of contemporary music. She is also active as a librettist and holds a doctoral degree in musicology from the University of Basel.

Born in Berlin/Germany, Anne-May studied at the University of Music Karlsruhe, as well as with Rudolf Piernay. Early in her career she appeared at the State Opera in Stuttgart, and has been a guest artist with the Nationaltheater Mannheim and Theater Basel, among others. Since 2012, she has been a frequent guest at the Lucerne Festival, premiering music-theater productions from Alfred Zimmerlin, Michael Wertmüller, Mike Svoboda, and Michel Roth. A recording of Michel Roth’s mono-opera Im Bau was released in December 2019 by the label WERGO. Further collaborations include, among others, composers Kurt Schwertsik, Manos Tsangaris, Andreas Eduardo Frank, and Hans Tutschku and the South African artist William Kentridge.

Anne-May Krüger works with groups such as ensemble recherche (Freiburg), Ensemble Ascolta (Stuttgart), Ensemble Phoenix Basel, and the Mondrian Ensemble (Basel). Together with Christian Zehnder, she has been a guest singer with Ensemble SoloVoices (Basel), performing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung at Lucerne Festival, Stockhausen-Stiftung Kürten, Festival "Imago Dei" (Krems) and ENSEMS (Valencia). Anne-May is a member of the ensemble æquatuor (Basel/Zürich) and Infinity Quartett (Basel). Opera productions have led to collaborations with conductors Bernhard Epstein, Michael Wendeberg and Titus Engel, as well as with stage directors Georges Delnon, Hendrik Müller, Massimo Rocchi, Johannes Schmid and Joachim Schlömer. She is a regular guest at renowned festivals, particularly for new music, such as "Wien Modern" (Vienna), "ZeitRäume Basel", "Rümlingen Festival" (CH), "MaerzMusik" (Berlin), "London Ear", "NUNC" (Northwestern University/Evanston) and "Contempuls" (Prague).

In 2021 her first libretto for Mike Svoboda's chamber opera Die Katze, die ihre eigenen Wege ging after Rudyard Kipling's The Cat Who Walked By Himself was premiered at Landestheater Linz/Austria. She is currently working on a new libretto Adam und Eva, based on Peter Hacks’s play by the same name which will be set to music by Mike Svoboda. The piece, a commission of the Schwetzinger Festspiele/Germany in cooperation with the Landestheater Linz/Austria, will be premiered in 2025.

As a musicologist, Anne-May’s activities focus on new music performance practice. From 2011 to 2021 she was part of the research department at the Hochschule für Musik Basel, where, in 2018 she has also started teaching. Currently, she is in charge of the development of two new Masters programs. Since fall 2020, she has also held the position of a lecturer at the department for musicology at the University of Basel. Her articles have been published in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Dissonance, PFAU, Laaber-Verlag and at Brepols Publishers Turnhout. She has been invited for presentations and lecture performances Europe-wide. In 2022 her dissertation Musik über Stimmen was published at Wolke Verlag Hochheim. Anne-May’s doctorate was funded by the Swiss National Funds.

In 2021 she founded, together with composer and sound performer Andreas Eduardo Frank, the duo frKRr. Their first program what you see – is what you get – is what you hear was premiered to great acclaim in Basel/Switzerland in April 2021, featuring compositions for voice, video and electronics by Paul Clift (world premiere) and Andreas Eduardo Frank as well as Luc Ferrari’s Monologos I for voice and tape machines. Their new program Music for Unicorns will be premiered in 2022 and includes a collective creation with composer and performer Chloé Bieri as well as a new composition by Mike Svoboda.

Prof. Svetlana Maraš

Svetlana Maraš (1985) is composer and sound artist active in the field of experimental music. She works in variety of formats, but most notably performs live electronic music, composes for ensembles and soloists, builds sound installations and experimental musical instruments and makes works for the radio. She is the winner of the most prestigious Serbian composition prize "Mokranjac", awarded by the Serbian Composers' Association.

From 2016-2021, she was composer in residence and artistic director at Radio Belgrade’s Electronic studio, where she established numerous programs such as artistic residencies, educational courses and restoration of the historical synthesiser - EMS Synthi 100.

Since 2021, she is co-director of Basel Electronic Studio, and professor of Creative Music Technology. She teaches various subjects that relate to theory and practice of electronic music and sound art. As a teacher, she encourages students to adapt the usage of technology to their own creative ideas, even though this means tweaking and miss-using the existing, or building the new technology. In a discursive manner, following her passion for musical semiotics, theory of art and philosophy, she teaches “Aesthetics and techniques of Electronic Music”, where she discusses with students and guest professionals variety of theoretical concepts (modern and historical) that relate to understanding, creating, presenting and distributing electronic music.

Maraš has presented her work internationally, at venues, festivals and events such as Wien Modern, Kunstmuseum (Basel), Haus der Kunst (Munich), Ruhr Triennial, CTM (Berlin), Ars Electronica (Linz), House of Electronic Arts (Basel), Espace Multimedia Gantner (Bourogne), Musikprotokoll (Graz), Heroines of Sound (Berlin), Onassis Cultural Centre (Athens), Stadttheater (Bern), Museum of Contemporary Art (Belgrade), Izlog Suvremenog Zvuka (Zagreb), Blurred edges (Hamburg), ICMC (New York), International Rostrum of Composers (Wroclaw), ISEA (Dubai), International Music Institute (Darmstadt), Orpheus Institute (Ghent) and numerous other places. Her music was used in theatre plays, experimental and documentary films and presented at places like Aubagne International Film Festival, Bitef theatre (Belgrade) and MOMA (New York).

Since 2022, she is a member of the Zürich Stadt-Music Commission.

Prof. Andrea Neumann

(*1968 Freiburg/Brsg) studied classical piano at the Berlin University of the Arts. Lives and works as a musician and composer in the fields of new music and experimental music in Berlin. She is part of the collective LABOR SONOR, which has curated a concert series since 2000 and festivals in Berlin since 2015.

Since 1996 she has been developing and playing her own instrument, the inner piano - an aluminium frame strung with strings, played by means of preparations and reinforced with the help of a mixing console and various pick-ups.

She has been instrumental in the development of Berlin's real-time music, which is situated between new music, improvisation, noise and sound art. Editor of echtzeitmusik berlin. self-determination of a scene, together with Burkhard Beins, Christian Kesten, Gisela Nauck, Wolke-Verlag Hofheim

Concert and festival performances in Europe, the USA, Canada, Argentina, Mexico, Russia, Australia, Taiwan, Vietnam, China and Japan.

Composition commissions from Deutschlandfunk, Bayrischer Rundfunk, MDR Leipzig, the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, EMS Stockholm, Nyy Musikk Oslo, among others

Prof. Michel Roth

Michel Roth, born 1976 in Altdorf, lives in Lucerne. He is professor of composition and music theory at the FHNW Academy of Music Basel and a member of its research department. As long-time director of the Lucerne Studio for Contemporary Music, he worked with Pierre Boulez, Helmut Lachenmann and Peter Eötvös, among others. Many radio and CD productions document his work, for which he has received numerous prizes and grants. His works can be heard regularly at international music festivals, including the opera "Im Bau" (2012, Theater Basel, Zurich, Barcelona) and the depressive operetta "Die Künstliche Mutter" (2016, Lucerne Festival, Gare du Nord Basel). He also researches and publishes on music-theoretical and interdisciplinary topics with a focus on game theory and indeterminacy (e.g. David Tudor), collaborative art (e.g. Dieter Roth and his "Rarely Heard Music") and organology (e.g. trombone and percussion playing techniques).

An artist in search: this is probably the most accurate portrait that can be drawn of the violist Geneviève Strosser. From her first concerts under the baton of Harnoncourt, to her encounter with Aperghis, via her daily exposure to the music of Bach, this search is reflected in all the facets of her profession as a musician-performer: her relationship with her instrument, her relations with other musicians, her creative work, her interdisciplinary approach, her programme design, her pedagogy… For her, the viola is a tool for tirelessly questioning the world and art, as well as a vehicle for expression and knowledge. Hence, she works endlessly on her repertoire everyday, enriching it, going from surprise to surprise, for herself as well as for her public.

Her quest for new artistic experiences has taken shape in recent months with a position as violist with the Ensemble Recherche (until Summer 2022), which enabled her to create Helmut Lachenmann’s String Trio No. 2 last May and which she recorded in the autumn. In July 2022, she was appointed principal viola with the Zurich Camerata. In the meantime, she has been visiting the Hungarian composer György Kurtág to work on his music and that of the past, especially Johann Sebastian Bach’s.

In the spring of 2023, she performed two monuments of viola music: Gérard Grisey’s Espaces acoustiques (24 March in Winterthur, Switzerland) and Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (30 March in Amsterdam).

As this list suggests, Geneviève Strosser is a fervent advocate of the music of today. This is a tropism that she developed as a teenager, discovering in the contemporary repertoire a prodigious sense of freedom that she had previously felt only in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. She has tirelessly explored the greatest works of the 20th and 21st centuries, sometimes in direct contact or even in collaboration with the composers: among others, Franco Donatoni, György Kurtag, Helmut Lachenmann, Heinz Holliger, Hannah Kulenty, Isabel Mundry, George Benjamin, Luca Francesconi. Stefano Gervasoni, Laurent Cuniot and Hugues Dufourt have each dedicated a viola concerto to her. Demonstrating great eclecticism in her aesthetic choices, she is today one of the most sought-after and recognised violists in the field and performs with such prestigious phalanxes such as the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Recherche (two groups of which she was a member), the Ensemble intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble Contrechamps or the Salzburg Camerata (to name but a few), under the direction of conductors such as Pierre Boulez, Stefan Asbury, Heinz Holliger, Peter Eötvös, Emilio Pomarico, Sylvain Cambreling – her involvement with them  remains an inexhaustible source of learning for her.

It is also an opportunity for her to approach other fields of creation, such as musical theatre, which she explores with Georges Aperghis within the framework of an ongoing relationship. She played in Commentaires, Machinations and Un Temps Bis. She is also the recipient of Volte-Face and Urwerk for solo viola, Crosswind for viola and four saxophones, the Rasch duo, and Die Hamletmaschine for ensemble, choir, three singers, percussion and solo viola.

Finally, her discography is devoted to the contemporary repertoire: from György Ligeti’s Sonata for viola (Æon, 2011) to George Benjamin’s Viola-Viola and works for solo viola by Georges Aperghis (Kairos, 2006).

Geneviève Strosser is particularly at ease in solo concerts, for which she carefully composes the programmes. These are all about putting her musical tastes into perspective, often going back to Bach, a reference point to which she returns again and again. Some of these performances are more like “lectures” or “concerts with commentary”: she opens the door of her studio to show the musician at work, searching and looking for what the musical discourse has to say that she has not yet perceived. The concert format is a laboratory for her, and her search to reinvent the encounter between a work and its audience occasionally leads her to collaborate with visual artists.

Geneviève Strosser does not, however, neglect the traditional concert, especially the symphonic one. With her founding experience with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, under the direction of Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Claudio Abbado, Carlo Maria Giulini, Paavo Berglund, Pierre Boulez, Sir Georg Solti and many others, she is regularly invited to play the role of principal viola with the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the BBC Wales, the Scottish National Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Monnaie, the Orquesta de Cadaquès, Symphonie Orchester Basel, and Orchestre de chambre d’Auvergne.

She is also frequently invited to play solo works with orchestra (Berlioz, Rihm, Mozart, Feldman, Grisey, Eötvös…) by orchestras such as the Gewandhaus Leipzig, SWR Stuttgart, SWR Freiburg, Orchestre Philharmonique de Strasbourg, Bavarian Radio Orchestra Munich, Radio Orchestra Frankfurt, Residentie Orchester Den Haag, Katowice Orchestra, La Verdi Milano, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Radio Orchestra Cologne, Basel Sinfonietta or the NDR Orchester Hamburg

A former member of the Vellinger String Quartet in London (with Gordan Nikolitch as first violin), Geneviève Strosser also performs in chamber music.

Finally, as the profession of musician-performer is also that of a teacher, teaching is for her the inseparable counterpart of her career as a concert performer. She shows a genuine vocation for transmission and is not content with teaching but develops a real reflection on the subject, learning from her students as much as they learn from her. Driven by her taste for foreign languages and other places, it is mainly outside France that she seeks teaching positions: she has taught string quartet at Trinity College of Music in London, viola at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Paris, and she has been Professor of viola at the Basel Academy of Music since 2004.

After several years of violin, Geneviève Strosser discovered both her her true calling and voice in the viola, thanks to her meeting with Claude Ducrocq at the Conservatoire de Strasbourg. He accompanied her until she entered the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris in 1988, in Serge Collot’s class, soon to be taken over by Jean Sulem.

Geneviève Strosser plays a viola by Matthias Albani from 1660, and a viola by Joël Bion from 1992.

Prof. Sarah Maria Sun

Sarah Maria Sun is known as one of the foremost and most extraordinary performers in the contemporary music scene. Her repertoire currently spans around 1500 compositions from the 16th to the 21st century, including more than 350 world premieres. She has a close working relationship with a wide variety of composers, including Helmut Lachenmann, Heinz Holliger, Salvatore Sciarrino and Bernhard Lang, among many others. North German Radio (NDR) has dedicated portrait concerts to her in 2012, 2016 and 2018.

In 2017 (“Lohengrin” by Salvatore Sciarrino) and 2019 (“Psychoses 4.48” by Philip Venables) she was nominated as Singer of the Year.

In the 2019/20 season, Sarah Maria Sun has performed Schönberg‘s Pierrot Lunaire and Weill‘s Seven Deadly Sins with the Ensemble Modern and HK Gruber at the Beethovenfest Bonn. She sang the role of Eliza Doolittle in Frederick Loewe‘s My Fair Lady in New Year’s Eve/New Year’s performances with the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester and Alan Gilbert at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg. Furthermore, she interpreted the world premiereFragmente einer Unzeit by Iris ter Shiphorst with the Ensemble Modern and Enno Poppe at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam and at November Music in S’Hertogenbosch. Concerts at Wien Modern, the Tonhalle Maag Zürich, the Osterfestival Tirol, the Philharmonie Luxembourg i. a. will complete the season. Summer 2021 she will give her debut as „Compagna“ in Luigi Nono‘s „Intolleranza“ at the Salzburger Festspiele with Ingo Metzmacher and the Viennese Philharmonics. She will also sing her debut as „Lulu“ at the mexican premiere of this Berg’s Opera in Mexico City.

Sarah Maria Sun regularly performs as a soloist in concert halls and festivals such as the Suntory Hall Tokyo, the Muziekgebow Amsterdam, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Tonhalle Zurich, the Auditorio National Madrid, the Berlin and Cologne Philharmonic, the Biennale Paris, Venice and Munich, the Arnold Schönberg Center Vienna and famous festivals in Witten, Donaueschingen, Herrenhausen and Cervantino and Vertice in Mexico.

Her tremendous adaptability is demonstrated on a regular basis on the music- theater stage. She has appeared at the opera houses in Zurich, Basel, Dresden, Frankfurt, Munich, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, Mannheim, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Luxembourg, Zagreb, and the Opéra Bastille and the Opéra Comique in Paris. She shows her skill for haunting theatrical and musical interpretation time and again in the depiction of complex female figures. In particular, the monodramas Yes I Will Yes by Dieter Schnebel (Elbphilharmonie Hamburg), Carlotas Zimmer by Arturo Fuentes with Klangforum Wien (Klangspuren Schwaz), Lohengrin by Salvatore Sciarrino (Salzburg Easter Festival), Psychoses 4.48 by Philip Venables (Semper Zwei Dresden) and Kolik by Jannik Giger, Leo Hoffmann and Benjamin von Bebber (Gare du Nord Basel) are especially noteworthy.

Sarah Maria Sun has performed with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Alan Gilbert, Thomas Hengelbrock, Susanna Mälkki, Peter Rundel, Heinz Holliger, together with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, the North, Bavarian, South-West and West German Radio

Orchestras, the Dresden Philharmonic, the Antwerp and Tokyo Symphony Orchestras and ensembles such as musikFabrik Köln, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Mosaik, Ensemble Intercontemporain as well as the string quartets Diotima, Arditti, Minguet and Signum.

From 2007-2014, she was the first soprano of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, a chamber ensemble of seven singers that has been one of the world’s leading pioneers of contemporary music for decades.

Sarah Maria Sun’s discography includes more than 30 CDs, some of which have been awarded prizes. In 2017, four of her six new releases were nominated for the Deutsche Schallplattenkritik prize and other awards. The album Modern Lied won the Coups de Coers. In spring 2020, her two latest and most contrasting albums were released by Mode Records: HARAWI with the famous song cycle by Olivier Messiaen (awarded with the “What a performance! 2019” award) and KILLER INSTINCTS, satirising a new generation of demagougues, with Musical- Pop- and Rocksong-Covers.

Sarah Maria Sun studied singing in Cologne and Stuttgart and most importantly worked with Darinka Segota and Tanja Ariane Baumgartner. She regularly gives masterclasses for vocal music from the 20th and 21st centuries; she has taught at universities and conservatoires in Oslo, Harvard, Chicago, Stockholm, Zurich, Bale, Rostock, Moscow, Dresden, Hannover, Graz or Berlin. Since 2019 she is teaching on a regular basis in Lucerne.

Prof. Mike Svoboda

The composer, trombone player and conductor Mike Svoboda is considered among the most innovative and versatile musicians of his generation. He grew up in Chicago and, after his composition and conducting studies, came to Germany with the help of a BMI Award to Young Composers in 1982. From 1984 to 1996 he worked with Karlheinz Stockhausen; during this time he stopped composing. His collaborations with Stockhausen and composers like Eötvös, Haas, Hosokawa, Lachenmann, Rihm, Smolka and Zappa have led Svoboda to premiere a plethora of new works over the last 35 years. After a self-imposed break of close to 20 years, Mike Svoboda began composing again in 2000. Since then, he has received commissions from festivals, orchestras and theatres, includes the State Opera Hannover and Stuttgart, the National Theatre Mannheim, the Südwestrundfunk [public broadcaster in southwest Germany] the ECLAT Festival and Lucerne Festival.

Mike Svoboda is a Professor at the FHNW Academy of Music in Basel. Together with his colleagues Marcus Weiss and Jürg Henneberger, he oversees the artistic direction of the MA in Performance, with a Major in Contemporary Music.

Prof. Caspar Johannes Walter

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, 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.
In 2002/2003 Caspar Johannes Walter was teacher of composition and composer in Residence at the University of Birmingham/UK, since 2006-13 he was professor for composition in Stuttgart/Germany and since 2013 at the Musikakademie Basel/Switzerland. In 2014 he was elected into the Akademie der Künste, Berlin, where he is at the moment curating the international project Labor Beethoven 2020, that focusses the view of the young generation of composers towards the renewing of intrinsic musical ideas in the spirit of Beethovens laboratorium artificiosum.

Karin Wetzel (born 1981 in Berlin) studied composition and music theory at the HMT Leipzig with Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf and Gesine Schröder, with additional semesters abroad at the Sibelius Academy Helsinki and the CNSM Paris. Subsequently she studied electroacoustic composition at the Zurich University of the Arts with Germán Toro-Pérez and Isabel Mundry and completed an artistic-scientific dissertation at the Kunstuniversität Graz. Her book "Das Werk im Werk - Konzepte des Poly-Werks" was published by Fink/Brill in 2022. Her works as a composer encompasses solo works, ensemble and orchestral music, electroacoustic works and installations. She has been artist in residence at the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles and at the Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. 2021 she was awarded the Werkjahr of the city of Zurich. Since 2021 Lecturer for Artistic Research at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Munich and since 2022 Professor for Music Theory at the Hochschule für Musik Basel.

Prof. Qiming Yuan

Qiming Yuan was born in Shanghai into a family of musicians. His musical education began at a very early age, first learning to play the violin before moving on to the piano and later the trombone. When he was 11, he entered a music academy in Shanghai, where he specialised in the trombone. Before long, he discovered a passion for composition and began taking classes. Radio Shanghai broadcast his first work for piano, which Qiming Yuan performed himself. Soon afterwards, he became the youngest student of composition under Prof. F. Goldmann at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK). His studies also included orchestral conducting under Prof. H. M. Rabenstein and Prof. M. Husmann. As an exchange student in Copenhagen, he studied composition under Hans Abrahamsen. He was one of 200 entrants at the Besançon International Competition for Young Conductors, and was named among the 10 finalists. His keen interest in connecting with music on a deeper level led him to study music theory under Prof. Fladt. Having graduated from the UdK Berlin in composition, orchestral conducting and music theory, he taught at the HfM Weimar and the HfM Dresden. In 2009 he was appointed Professor of Music Theory at the FHNW Academy of Music in Basel. Alongside his teaching commitments, he successfully completed a postgraduate course in Jazz Piano at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He has taught composition at the HfMT Cologne since 2017. He has also published many research papers and presented widely in Europe and Asia. His current work focuses on the relationship between cognition, interpretation and perception; the rhythmical function in music; the philosophy of music; historical events and music.