Beat Furrer is to be awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize 2018 for his life’s work. The award ceremony takes place on 3 May 2018 in the Prinzregententheater Munich.
An artist of the highest integrity, an output of irresistible and commanding power is how the Board of Trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation has acclaimed the Swiss composer Beat Furrer, born in 1954. For many years he has had a tremendous influence on contemporary music – as a conductor, founder of influential institutions such as the Klangforum Wien and Impuls Akademie Graz, composition professor and a much sought-after teacher.
In his compositional output Beat Furrer is an analyst and a sensuous creator, his works have an unmistakable language and a compelling effect. Beat Furrer’s key objective is to narrate a drama musically from its core. His works explore the ramifications of human emotions and at the same time create a layer of timeless, supra-personal validity, with an effective dramaturgy of tensions and discontinuities all of its own. Music theatre is at the heart of his output. Works such as Begehren and the sound theatre piece FAMA are frequently performed and exert an undiminished fascination. “The music must create the conditions where the attention is focussed on the voice, so that the voice itself narrates. So as I search for possible forms of narrative, I indeed search for ‘melody’: a melody in the process of emerging, in the space between language and sound of the voice, integrated into an instrumental structure as its extension and metamorphosis. This results in expressivity and narrative beyond language.” (Beat Furrer, 2018). Since 1997 his works have been published exclusively by Bärenreiter-Verlag.
From the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation citation:
“For many years, Beat Furrer has helped to shape the contemporary musical world in the most impressive of ways, and his influence on younger generations of composers and interpreters is, as a result, enormous. The Board of Trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation honors this Swiss composer – born in 1954 – for a lifetime’s compositional output which fails to be pigeonholed and is of an almost suggestive power. Remaining unfailingly loyal to his unique sound world, Furrer never simply reproduces the tried and tested, but develops new musical ideas with each new work in order to explore unfamiliar aesthetic terrain. It is while listening to Furrer's music that the sense of metamorphosis becomes clear: the precisely defined movement from silence to sound or noise, from effect to non-effect, from the familiar to the almost sinister. But is not only the aesthetic aspect which conforms to this sense of metamorphosis, but also his output as a whole. ‘Composing would no longer interest me if I was reproducing an already defined concept, rather than taking a step in a new direction,’ says Furrer. Meanwhile, his latest opera score is currently nearing completion – Violetter Schnee, an adaptation of the novel by the same name by Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin, with a libretto by Händl Klaus. And it is certainly a step in a whole new direction.”
Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
(from [t]akte 1/2018)