Peter Ablinger

Biography

Peter Ablinger (b. 1959, Austria; based in Berlin) was appointed to the position of Professor of Composition at the University of Huddersfield in September 2012. He will be particularly associated with the work of the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM) conducting masterclass, lectures and special projects with students and staff. One of the most innovative and influential composers in the field of new music today, Peter Ablinger’s oeuvre ranges from orchestral works and operas to installations. His work is regularly presented at all the major festivals internationally including Berlin Biennale, Venice Biennale, Holland Festival, Triennale Köln and Carnegie Hall New York. His publications include more than 30 CDs and numerous articles in journals, books, and art anthologies. His work has been recognized by prizes such as the 2008 Andrzej-Dobrowolski-Kompositionspreis and the 2010 Deutschen Klangkunstpreis. Ablinger’s work with noise, spatialisation, spectral modelling/transcription, and the perception of sound has frequently been supported by major research centres in music technology – most notably the Experimentalstudio of the Heinrich Strobel Stiftung in Freiburg, TU Berlin, and IEM in Graz. At the core of his work is an exploration of the differences between reality and our perception of reality in sound. The act of listening and noise, or rather, ‘Rauschen’ (the German term) have been the dominant themes of Ablinger's music and research for more than 20 years. His questioning of fundamental values of musical perception using basic tools such as scales can perhaps be related to his background in graphic design, including his studies with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, who pioneered the use of graphically notated scores. ‘Peter Ablinger is one of few artists today who uses noise without any kind of symbolism - not as a signifier for chaos, energy, entropy, disorder, or uproar; not for opposing something, or being disobedient or destructive. As in all these cases of music deliberately involving noise, noise is the case, but for Ablinger it is noise alone. Peter Ablinger has also come a long way in questioning the nature of sound, time, and space (the components usually thought central to music), and his findings have jeopardized and made dubious conventions usually thought irrefutable. These insights pertain to repetition and monotony, reduction and redundancy, density and entropy.’ (Christian Scheib)

Research Interest

Music