Giga-Hertz Award 2009 & Walter-Fink-Prize of ZKM

The Giga-Hertz Prize will be awarded for the third time this year. In the last three years, the Giga-Hertz Prize has become an important heavyweight in electroacoustic music. This has been helped by the jurors, who include composers Pierre Boulez, Wolfgang Rihm, Horacio Vaggione and François Bayle, and the world-renowned laureates Jonathan Harvey (2007), Trevor Wishart (2008) and, this year, Jean-Claude Risset, who is globally influential as a composer and researcher. The jury, consisting of Trevor Wishart, Vinko Globokar, Armin Köhler, Detlef Heusinger and Ludger Brümmer, quickly agreed on the designation for the Giga-Hertz Prize, as there are only a few personalities of Risset's stature who have expanded computer music to such an extent through their research and through their musical work. He is one of the pioneers of digital music.

The production awards so far been have given to twelve composers, all of whom are already, or are in the process of becoming, established figures in the world of music. Some of the works created within the prize have already been performed or are still awaiting their premiere. The works of Åke Parmerud and Natasha Barrett, both composers with international reputations, will be presented to the audience for the first time on the evening of the award ceremony.

All this is a collaboration between the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO of SWR Freiburg and the Institute for Music and Acoustics of the ZKM | Karlsruhe. A cooperation that can show what is possible in the field of electroacoustic music. In addition, the prize and the prize winners were reflected by coverage and extensive radio broadcasts - especially by SWR2 but also by Deutschlandfunk. The response in the print media also illustrates the significance that the prize has achieved. This is not least because of the patronage of Günther H. Oettinger, Minister President of the State of Baden-Württemberg.

After three years, an initial summary can be drawn. The average number of about 160 submissions from all continents of the world indicates the echo that the prize achieves. This shows how attractive it is for composers to work in the studios in Freiburg or Karlsruhe. The main prizes awarded so far have all gone to composers whose reputation is undisputed. It can be stated that the Giga-Hertz Prize has gained its role as the most important prize in electroacoustic music. The prize is also an important heavyweight for the two studios. Not least for this reason, Prof. Peter Weibel will personally guide through the evening.

Valerio Murat's work »Les Machines Spirituelles« with texts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is a homage to the Futurists 100 years after Marinetti's »Manifesto«. It begins with Marinetti's words »Time and space died yesterday. We live in the absolute«. Murat picks up on this theme in a confident shaping of time and arcs of tension. In the 15-minute composition, he unites text, music and sound in a sensuous naturalness, but at the same time also in a bursting expressiveness, to create a work of strong sonority and gesture. This acousmatic work knows how to play with the material but also to bundle the tension into powerful layers.

With his work »Baile« for double bass, clarinet, tape and live electronics, the Argentinian composer Francosco Colasanto, born in 1971, created an exciting melange of aesthetic fragments in which the electronics and the clarinet artfully combine to form a polyphonic rhythmically dominated structure. He reduces the material to the essential and puts the complexity into the playful expression. A lively piece has been created here, whose diversity and tension impressed the jury.

The work »West Pole« for piano and tape by Panayiotis Kokoras is characterised by a strict logic of tension that arises from the musical structure, from the close interlocking between piano and tape from the complex relationship between live and pre-produced sounds. 

The dense intermingling of noise sounds with pitches creates a richness of structures that are nevertheless tangibly formulated and sensually positioned in the piece. 

From these components arose a work full of vibrating energy that is able to fascinate.