outHEAR Faculty
Photo by Jean Radel
Bedrossian was born in Paris on February 3rd, 1971. His music, beyond its immediate physical impact, invokes a forceful yet refined dramatic intensity. The invention of sonic matter and the expressive density in his writing sculpts a musical form rich with acoustic ambiguity and auditory illusions.
After studying harmony, counterpoint, orchestration and music analysis, he studied composition with Allain Gaussin and entered the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP) in the class of Gérard Grisey and Marco Stroppa. In 2001-2002, he attended the Cursus in composition and computer music at IRCAM and received education from Philippe Leroux, Brian Ferneyhough, Tristan Murail and Philippe Manoury. Meanwhile, he completed his training with Helmut Lachenmann at Centre Acanthes in 1999 and International Ensemble Modern Academy in 2004.
His works have been performed worldwide by ensembles and orchestras such as L’Itinéraire, 2e2m, Ensemble Ictus, Court-circuit, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble intercontemporain, Klangforum Wien, Contrechamps, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Eco Ensemble, Diotima Quartet, Tana Quartet, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, SWR Symphonieorchester, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Many international festivals present his music, especially Manca (France), Musica Nova (Finland), Festival Internacional Cervantino (Mexique), RTÉ Living Music Festival (Ireland), Présences (France), Musica (France), Borealis Festival (Norway), Ars Musica (Belgium), Wittener Tage für Neue Musik (Germany), Nuova Consonanza, Suona Francese (Italy), Printemps des Arts de Monte-Carlo, Festival international d’art lyrique d’Aix-en-Provence (France), Fabbrica Europa (Italy), Wien Modern (Austria), Archipel (Switzerland), Donaueschinger Musiktage, MaerzMusik, Sommer in Stuttgart, Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, NOW! (Germany), ReMusik (Russia), Venice Biennale (Italy) and ManiFeste (France).
In 2001, he received a grant from the Meyer Foundation and the Fondation Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet for Vocation, then in 2004, the Hervé Dugardin Prize of SACEM. In 2005, the Institut de France (Académie des beaux-arts) awarded him the Pierre Cardin Prize of Musical Composition. Franck Bedrossian also received the prize for young composers of SACEM in 2007. In 2012 at Donaueschinger Musiktage, he was awarded the SWR Symphonieorchester Prize for his piece Itself.
Franck Bedrossian was a resident at the Villa Medici from 2006 to 2008. He teaches composition at the University of California at Berkeley from 2008 to 2019, then at Kunstuniversität Graz starting in 2020.
His works are published by Éditions Gérard Billaudot, Verlag Neue Musik, and Maison ONA.
Dimitri Papageorgiou, artistic co-director
Papageorgiou’s music presents a continuous negotiation of the distinction between the self and the other and the fluidity of their relationship (where does the similarity ends between two different entities and where does the difference start?). The core of his work revolves around specific themes: time, identity/similarity/difference, repetition, memory, and order — the fragility of order in the creative process. Papageorgiou perceives the concept of memory - the way we consider the past - not as faithful reconstitution driven by nostalgia, but from the point of view of its creative dimension, that is, as a constantly updated reconstruction of the past from the point of view of the present and through a process of constant reformulation: the workings of memory as a compositional metaphor. All musical ideas are imperfect and vulnerable, ephemeral and distorted. They are constantly in a state of flux and under constant revision.
His works have been aired several times by the in Germany, Austria, Greece, and several U.S. Radio Stations. He has appeared in festivals, conferences, and concerts in almost
Photo by Farhad Ilaghi Hosseini
40 different cities in Europe, U.S.A. and Asia and in countries such as Austria, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, Finland, Russia, Greece, Cyprus, Serbia, Croatia, Iran, Turkey, Armenia, Hong Kong, and several States of the U.S.A. (NY, IL, CA, FL, MI, IA, OH, GA, etc). He has worked together with ensembles such as Klangforum Vienna, Oerknal, Interface, Zeitfluss, Airborne Extended, Il Suono Giallo, dissonart, Etcetera, UMS & JIP, Trio IAMA, duo Goliardi, trio Artresonanz, Thessaloniki State Orchestra, Athens Radio Symphony Orchestra, etc. He has received commissions by several institutions — such as the Delian Academy with the support of Siemens Music Foundation, Institute for Electronic Music and Acoustics of the University of Music and Drama at Graz, Austrian National Radio (ÖRF) and Literature Forum Graz, Kultur Zentrum bei den Minoriten Graz, SCI/ASCAP (U.S.A.), Thessaloniki Concert Hall, Il Suono Contemporary Music Week, Yarava Music Group (Tehran, Iran) — and performers and ensembles — such as Dimitri Polisoidis (violist of the ensemble Klangforum, Austria), Ensemble Interface (Germany), Zeitfluss Ensemble (Austria), UMS & JIP (Switzerland), Trio IAMA (Greece), Ensemble Etcetera (USA), duo Goliardi (Greece), etc.
He has served as guest composer at the University of Iowa School of Music, the University of Nevada at Reno, the University of Music, Drama and Media at Hanover, Bilgi University of Istanbul, and the University of Tehran. He is a faculty member at the Delian Academy for New Music, an international summer academy for composers and sound artists, which is curated under the auspices of Georges Aperghis and is located on the island of Mykonos, Greece.
Currently an associate professor of composition, he was appointed at the Department of Music Studies of the Aristotle University of Thessaloni in 2007. He majored in composition with Hermann Markus Pres sl and Andrej Dobrowolski at the University of Music and Drama at Graz, Austria. From 1998-2002 he held a Presidential Fellowship of the University of Iowa, U.S.A., for a Ph.D. in composition with Donald Martin Jenni, Jeremy Dale Roberts, and David Karl Gompper.
Orestis Toufektsis, artistic co-director
Orestis Toufektsis (Austria/Greece) was born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. From 1986 he studied piano, harmony and counterpoint at the conservatory, and at the same time geodesy at the Technical University in Thessaloniki. From 1993 he studied composition with Gerd Kühr at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Graz.
He is the winner of many awards and acknowledgments (for instance, the City of Klagenfurt Prize for Composition in 1995 and the Advancement Award for Music from the City of Graz in 2007). He is one of the founders of the artresonanz ensemble. Since 2007 he has been the president of the composers’ association "die andere saite".
He had works commissioned by ORF-Musikprotokoll 2012, State of Styria, Cultural Centre of Minoriten (Kulturzentrum bei den Minoriten, Graz), by the ensembles artresonanz and zeitfluss as well as the City of Thessaloniki Symphony Orchestra.
His compositions were performed in Vienna, Graz, Klagenfurt, Linz, London, Bremen, Zagreb, Athens and Thessaloniki, as well as Austrian, German and Greek radio stations.
In the season 2007/2008 Toufektsis was a guest-composer at the Institute for Electronic Music of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz („Compositional aspects of self-similar structures“), in 2010 he took part in the project „Algorithmic composition in the context of New Music“, and 2011-2014 an international research project Point/Patterns of Intuition (IEM of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz).
Since October 1999 he teaches Music Theory at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz.
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