Hans Tutschku

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

Hans Tutschku is the Fanny P. Mason Professor of Music at Harvard University, where he has overhauled the program in electroacoustic composition since his arrival, in 2004. He studied composition in Birmingham, Dresden, The Hague, and Paris and has been a member since 1982 of Ensemble für Intuitive Musik Weimar, with which he has toured more than 30 countries. He participated in concert cycles of Karlheinz Stockhausen to study sound direction and took composition courses with Brian Ferneyhough and Klaus Huber. Aside from composing instrumental and electronic music, he has realized several multimedia productions, conceiving video and choreography.

Tutschku’s project is composing a piece for soprano, large ensemble, and electronics based on poetry by Karl Lubomirski, who has played a key role in Tutschku’s work since the 1990s. The new piece is a continuation of his research into the relationship between spoken/sung language and musical expression. While Lubomirski’s poems are already highly musical, Tutschku is confronting them with his own musical structures, creating a sonic world nurtured by this encounter.

Tutschku received his PhD in music composition from the University of Birmingham in 2003. He is a cofounder of Klang Projekte Weimar, which has organized a yearly festival of contemporary music in the city of Weimar since 1988. He has received numerous composition prizes, among them a Bourges International Electroacoustic Award, a second prize from Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo, a first prize at Musica Nova, the Prix Ars Electronica, and the Prix international Noroit-Léonce Petitot.