Giga-Hertz Award 2012 & Walter-Fink Prize

The jury was impressed by Pauline Olivero's innovative strength, the independence of her artistic path, the consistency of her activities and the universality of her aesthetic position. Born in 1932 in Houston, Texas, Pauline Oliveros is one of the pioneers of a completely new music that operates independently of European patterns. In this she exposes not only the music itself, but also the way in which music is received and the role that music plays in our lives. The term »deep listening«, which she coined, advanced to a new way of thinking about sound and the relationship of the listener to this sound. Oliveros worked for a long time as an accordionist, among others at the premiere of Terry Riley's »In C« in 1964. In her own music she was influenced by the characteristics of this instrument. Thinking in sound layers as well as in long uninterrupted events goes back to these experiences. She anticipated what was later called Ambient and Noise. With her unpretentious attitude, she developed an individual, playful approach to a multitude of electronic or acoustic instruments, away from the mainstream. In 1961, together with Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Ramon Sender and Morton Subotnik, she founded the still existing San Francisco Tape Music Center, taught at Mills College, the University of San Diego and currently at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In addition to the accordion, she impovises with her own expanded instrument system, a set of instruments for real-time signal processing. She founded the Pauline Oliveros Foundation, which later became the Deep Listening Institute.

»Emmanuel Nunes was and remains one of the most idiosyncratic and exciting composers of our time,« writes Gerhard Rohde in his obituary published in the FAZ on September 4, 2012. He was one of the few participants of the composition courses of Boulez and Stockhausen to be able to translate their then still latent serial approach into his own compositional language and to continue it, and he was exciting because he fought with unrelenting consistency for a musical ideal that can rarely be achieved under the constraints of today's music. He is honoured here for his use of and for live electronics. Already in his first significant work with this Transformations, commissioned in 1986 by the then Südwestfunk Baden-Baden in the Experimentalstudio Freiburg, he consistently used the sound »transformation« possibilities available to him at that time and added a spatial dimension to the work via the halaphone.

He then continued the work begun in the experimental studio at the IRCAM, with some of his works strangely bearing German titles such as »Nachtmusik, Lichtung, Einspielung« or even his music theatre »Das Märchen« after Goethe. This affinity to German culture and language finds its final point in »Peter Kien – an acoustic mask«, his last work with live electronics as well as his last opus. It works with speech rhythmics, speech melodics and speech phenomenology and, like these, the inherent problems of linguistic and musical communication associated with them. The »acoustic mask« refers to the term »character mask« and poses the unanswered question of the extent to which such a mask also exists in musical terms. The task of live electronics is to decipher and orchestrate instrumental character masks or instrumental idioms, it is not »make-up« (as Emmanuel Nunes himself says) on the texture, but essential for the actual content of the work. Consequently, only the transformed sounds from the loudspeaker are relevant to the sound image, which is why Nunes even considered an acoustic wall in front of the musicians at the premiere of »Peter Kien – an acoustic mask«. His ability to think in different layers and thus develop a complex musical phenomenology points far into the future.