Composition

Studies in musical composition continue to play an important role in the history of the Berlin University of the Arts. Major composers including Isang Yun, Luigi Nono (as guest professor), Dieter Schnebel, Friedrich Goldmann and Walter Zimmermann, as well as numerous guest artists living in and visiting Berlin, have taught at the UdK and its predecessor the HdK.

Central to our program of study in composition is the development and support of one's individual, authentic musical voice and cultivating artistic means to articulate it. These days, music is built on studies of sound and auditory culture in myriad manifestations - as concert music: instrumental, electronic, notated, improvised; as sound art; as various intermedial hybrids. Composition is a search, researching, fusing, deconstructing and forming histories, techniques and traditions, old and new: instrumentations, notations, materials and forms. While remembering our multiple pasts we search into a new sounding future.

To shape these possibilities, individual one-on-one lessons may move freely from mentor to mentor based on a student's needs and wishes, and the curriculum allows flexible and individual design, while covering basic and fundamental techniques. The work specific to composition is complemented by extensive collaborations with students and teachers from the instrumental performance programs (classical, jazz and early music), as well as the conducting, voice/music theater, musicology and pedagogy programs, in addition to the rich possibilities of interdisciplinary contact with the other artistic faculties (sound studies, visual arts, etc.).

Students have access to three electroacoustic studios (the U.NIK studio of the UdK with classic historical synthesizers and processors; the studio at the Technische Universität TU Berlin with sound spatialisation technology and wave-field synthesis; and the STEAM at Hochschule für Musik HfM Hanns Eisler and its acousmatic-inspired loudspeaker orchestra). The regular study curriculum is augmented with lectures, symposia, workshops and projects supported by klangzeitort (Institute for New Music of UdK and HfM). Student ensemble and orchestral works are regularly workshopped and professionally recorded by our Studio Orchestra, chamber and electroacoustic pieces are presented in the Zoom/Fokus student concert series, and selected compositions are played by the Ensemble ilinx and guest ensembles at the Festivals crescendo and Mehrlichtmusik.