The field of contemporary music in Austria is evolving. Responsible for this development is above all a new generation of composers, who expand the spectrum of contemporary music in this country with fascinating new facets. In this part of the series “Austria’s young composers”, mica takes a closer look at Matthias Kranebitter.
Fast Facts
Matthias Kranebitter was born in 1980 in Vienna. After graduating from high school in 1998, he first began studying mathematics at the University of Vienna, before he enrolled in 2000 at the University of Music and Performing Arts. He studied electro-acoustic composition with Dieter Kaufmann and German ToroPerez, media composition and applied music in the class of Klaus Peter Sattler, and piano with Christiane Karajev. Postgraduate studies in composition at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam in Contemporary Music Through NonWestern Techniques with Rafael Reina and composition lessons with Fabio Nieder. Since 2009 he lives and works in Austria again and is attending postgraduate composition studies at the University of Music in Graz with Alexander Stankovski.
Portrait
Mathematics and musicology led Matthias Kranebitter directly to composition and piano studies. Based on this, he acquired a wide spectrum of compositional techniques: In addition to media and electro-acoustic composition, he also ventured an excursion to Amsterdam in order to complete the postgraduate composition course “Contemporary Music through NonWestern Techniques”.
This diversity is also evident in his compositions – he remixed Haydn’s 94th Symphony or plays in his Concerto for saxophone and midi orchestra with scales and musical phrases. And sometimes you may ask yourself: Is this all for real? At the latest, when hearing “ragzigzag” with a rapid ragtime in a Dadaist manner and when listening to “spreuundscherben”, the first notes of “Happy Birthday” sound between avant-garde complexity, there is no doubt about the infectious humor of the composer. At the same time the skillful handling of the connotations manifests itself in the different styles. For this type of music about music, Kranebitter questions the mostly social foreclosure of individual music scenes and brings fresh air to the comtemporary music scene, which is often regarded as inaccessible.
Doris Weberberger
Important Compositions
spreu und scherben
This composition attempts to question both taboos of contemporary music, as well as a valid aesthetic values. Situations, commonly considered as failed and are subsequently screened out or adjusted. But the question remains whether it is the chaff, which runs the rich and substantial.
Concerto for alto saxophone and midi orchestra in D major
With a huge sound density, the trashy, electronic midi sounds are poured over the virtuosic soloists, as an ironic statement of our diverse media society.
Candle light music with rondo – for piano solo
An anti-piece for the reduction of material that in its material wealth and heterogeneity always trys to explore the limits of work stability, creating permanent channel surfing between different emotional states, which emerges into a kaleidoscope of logically nested, but seemingly contradictory musical spots.
http://www.myspace.com/matthiaskranebitter