Giga Hertz Award 2019: Éliane Radigue receives the Giga Hertz Award 2019 for lifetime achievement

The 2019 Giga Hertz Grand Award, endowed with €10,000, goes this year to Éliane Radigue. As a visionary of electronic music she is honored for her lifetime achievement. In the early years of her career she emancipated herself and her work while in New York City through using an analog synthesizer. Later, she only used tape to store her work. Her musical works are characterized by their long forms and the long time they take to develop. The focus is firmly on aesthetic rather than technical innovation. Éliane Radigue’s synthesizer of preference is the ARP 2500.

From around 150 international submissions the jury nominated two other outstanding pieces: Imitation Game by Artemi-Maria Gioti wins the €5,000 Giga Hertz Production Award. The second Production Award, also endowed with €5,000, goes to Hongshuo Fan for his composition Handwriting・WuXing. In addition, honorable mentions were awarded to Panayiotis Kokoras for the composition Rhino and Otto Wanke for the work ...in... .

Since 2007, the Giga Hertz Award for electronic and acousmatic music has been jointly awarded by the ZKM | Karlsruhe and the Experimentalstudio of the SWR public broadcaster. The members of the jury this year are: Ludger Brümmer (composer and head of the ZKM Hertz Lab), Detlef Heusinger (artistic director of the SWR Experimentalstudio), Björn Gottstein (musicologist and artistic director of the Donaueschingen Music Festival), Dr. Rebecca Fiebrink (professor, Computing Department, Goldsmiths, University of London), and Dr. Palle Dahlstedt (composer and professor of Art & Technology, Aalborg University, Sweden).