Within the frame of the «23. Lange Nacht der Musik» my piano piece »four stars and one dark nebula« will be premiered by the German pianist Annette Kurz in Oldenburg on June 17. The work was awarded a second prize in the 21st Carl von Ossietzky Kompositionswettbewerb organised by the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg.
A primary goal of the composition competition was to find and present new works that are ideally suitet for discovering experimental playing techniques and expanding a student’s pianistic skills in that respect:
Die eingesendeten Werke sollen von geschulten Laien bzw. interessierten Klavierstudierenden gut zu lesen und aufführbar sein, um die Literatur experimenteller Spielweisen am Tasteninstrument kennenzulernen und als Erweiterungen des Klangspektrums erfahrbar zu machen.
https://uol.de/kompositionswettbewerb
Admittingly most of my piano pieces are quite hard to learn and require solid pianistic abilities in many ways—however, everything I write remains perfectly playable and several of my compositions have been staged by students thus far. It is very important to me that on the one hand no compromises are made with regard to what it takes to create a certain soundscape: If it means to be techically difficult it will simply turn out to become an arduous piece to learn—so what. We take things seriously and practising takes a lot of time, but if we love what we’re doing professionally, we love practising something very hard whenever the outcome is good.
On the other hand, I keep striving towards being a ‹friendly composer› in terms of notation. Perhaps, because of creating graphical works as an artist as well, I am definitely not interested in complexifying my scores graphically. That’s old school in my opinion, we have had that since the 60s of the very past century and I feel there isn’t any need to emulate this tradition any longer.
I’m really happy that my attempt of creating a piece that conveys my personal language uncompromisingly while being still attractive for young and less experienced piano students to learn was awarded a prize in composition. It means a lot to me, because if our music is not eligible for young musicians at all, they will just keep loving the old pieces forever, but not the new ones.