Austria’s Young Composers: Thomas Wally


The field of contemporary music currently seems to be emerging. Mainly responsible for this movement in Austria is a young generation of composers who extend the stylistic range of contemporary music with a lot of compositional creativity and unique sounding facets. This time mica portrays the composer Thomas Wally, who was awarded with the „outstanding artist award” by the Federal Ministry of Education, Arts and Culture in 2010.

Thomas Wally does not limit himself to a particular method of composition, but continues to develop new approaches. In “meer, teich, schwefelquelle” for six instruments and “Caprice” for string trio, it is, as August Stringberg describes in “The Other Strindberg”, the intuitive creation of the moment. Short surging runs and glissandos lead for example in the latter work to forth breaking phrases, which again, as quickly as they came, return to quiet moments with harmonics and sustained notes. In other works the starting point is a clearly defined and systematic idea. During composing, this again can also be adapted  in the wake of the dialectical process, for the sonic result does not service of the system, but vice versa. Source material for “impressions … en relief II” for piano and eleven instruments are: trill, cluster, rapid character and interval.

In alternating sections, Wally set them next together in blocks and lets them intertwine in each other. Although the sound has always played a major role, Wally has extended his recent work with microtonal modes of composition. What unites all these works is the idea of interlocking, where a musical element develops from the previous one. In addition to the sound parameters, he also uses time modulations, which result in organic appearing structures that are often characterized by a melancholic gesture.