About
Brigitta Muntendorf
The German-Austrian composer Brigitta Muntendorf has internalized referentiality (music to kin) as a compositional principle in her music and creates a multi-layered web of analog-digital musical modes of expression. Her settings range from instrumental, choral, and orchestral music to transdigital music/dance theater and 3D sound/AR installations.
She lived in artist residencies of the Cité Internationale des Arts and the Villa Kamogawa in Paris and Kyoto, received the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation’s Young Composer’s Prize and the German Young Music Authors Award of GEMA, is the founder of Ensemble Garage and former artistic director of the queer FMN Festival. Her works are shown by festivals and museums worldwide such as Ruhrtriennale, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Tanz im August, Hollandfestival, Kyoto Experiment, TPAM Festival or Warsaw Autumn. Her installations have been presented at Kunsthalle Mannheim, Duolun MoMa Shanghai or BANKArt Temporary (Yokohama), among others. She works with numerous ensembles like Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien or Les Siècles and recently presented her new 3D audio space oratorio ORBIT – A War Series for AI-Voice-Clones and electronics at the La Biennale in Venice. Since 2018 she is professor for composition in Cologne. In 2023 her Trilogy for Two Pianos and live electronics (GrauSchumacher Piano Duo) was awarded with the German Record Critics’ Award.
Artist Statement
Through my intensive work with 3D audio in the field of music theater, instrumental music, and most recently in ORBIT – A War Series as a pure “Space Oratorio” for 52 speakers at the Venice Music Biennale for electronics and singing AI voice clones, I repeatedly encounter the fact that “immersion” requires its own dramaturgies to bring music, narrative, and the role of the audience into a specific engagement for this medium.
I am interested in dramaturgies that partially originate in virtual reference spaces, such as Environmental Storytelling, and new formats based on an interaction between composition and reception. Furthermore I have been working with cloned (vocal) voices, as the use of AI and thus artificial singers seems a logical consequence of immersion: In a space where sound takes on actions and performance, it is automatically the audience that, as a physically present entity, is assigned a new role. I want to explore this role: How does an audience emotionally react in specific 3D audio spaces? What is the relationship between immersion on one side and the emptiness of the physical space, the absence of human presence in a concert, an “aural opera” on the other side?
SOUND OF STORY is a research cluster consisting of artistic presentations and micro-studies focusing on the interactions between perception and narration in immersive and 3D-Audio soundscape. Audio theater, space opera, audio-tactile installations – the aim of SOUND OF STORY is to create new performance formats and new roles for the audience.
Project : SOUND OF STORY
SOUND OF STORY is a research cluster consisting of artistic presentations and micro-studies focusing on the interactions between perception and narration in immersive and 3D-Audio soundscape. Audio theater, space opera, audio-tactile installations – the aim of SOUND OF STORY is to create new performance formats and new roles for the audience.
Brigitta Muntendorf past works
