Former Geballe fellow and composer Hans Thomalla is to receive one of the three prestigious prizes for young composers awarded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. The prize is valued at 40,000 euros and is awarded together with a composition commission.
The award will be presented to Thomalla at a musical ceremony in Munich at the Cuvilliés Theatre on 24 May 2011. The saxophone quartet XASAX will perform his new work for the first time. The board of trustees of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, which includes the composers Wolfgang Rihm and Helmut Lachenmann, sees Thomalla as being one of the most important up-and-coming young composers.
Hans Thomalla was born in Bonn, Germany in 1975, and studied composition at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule. In 1999 he was appointed first assistant dramaturge, later dramaturge and artistic advisor to the director at the Stuttgart Opera, where he worked on the new productions of Lachenmann’s Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern as well as Schreker’s Gezeichnete among others.
From 2002-2007 he pursued a Doctor of Musical Arts at Stanford University. He was a fellow of the DAAD, the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, and the Stanford Humanities Center during his studies. Hans Thomalla won the Christoph-Delz-Prize in 2006 and the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis in 2004, and he has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and the SWR-Experimentalstudio.
His music has been performed at major Festivals, such as Tanglewood, Donaueschingen, Wien Modern, Witten, Ultraschall Berlin, ECLAT-Festival, Takefu, and Steirischer Herbst. In 2005 the Festival d’Automne à Paris presented a portrait of his music in two concerts with the ensemble recherche. The City of Zurich, Switzerland, featured his music in four concerts at the 2008 Contemporary Music Days. In 2008 a Portrait-CD with Hans Thomalla’s chamber music played by the ensemble recherche and Lucas Fels was released on the Wergo Label. Future projects include an Opera Fremd for the main stage of the Stuttgart Opera, a new piece for the Donaueschingen Festival and a string quartet for the Arditti Quartet.
Hans Thomalla is on the advisory board for the new director of the Darmstadt Summer Courses, and he was on the courses composition faculty in 2010. Since 2007 he has been assistant professor of composition at Northwestern University in Chicago.
Visit the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation for more information about Hans Thomalla.
