24th Kompolize Winter 2025
The Lietzeorchester jury has made its decision: winner of the 24th International Composition Competition Kompolize Summer 2025 is Nikolaus Gerszewski with his composition Beethoven Square. The world premiere by the Lietzeorchester will take place on July 19, 2025 in the Emmaus Church in Berlin-Kreuzberg and on July 25, 2025 in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche at the Breitscheidplatz in Berlin-Charlottenburg. A third performance is planned for July 27, 2025 at the open-air stage of the Zitadelle in Berlin-Spandau.
Nikolaus Gerszewski, born 1964, lives in Hamburg and Budapest. He is an academically trained visual artist and a self-taught composer. He worked with geometric-abstract painting before switching to the material of sound in 2008 as a consequence of the dematerialization of the art object. Since 2009, several of his works have been premiered in the USA. In 2011, his ensemble work Kodam Gobar was awarded 1st prize at the Hamburg Klangwerktage. Since 2014, he has regularly given courses on experimental music in theory and practice at the Pécs University of Sciences (PTE) and the Budapest University of Fine Arts (MKE). In 2020 his vibraphone solo piece Sustain was performed at Penn State University by Zachary Wilson as part of the Smith Publication anthology Vibraphone Century. In 2023 his CD Three Works for Strings was released on HatHut. His scores are available from Frog Peak Music.
Nikolaus Gerszewski writes about his Beethoven Square:
I turned sixty last year and thought it was about time I took on the orchestra. I had been looking for a way to tackle this format for a long time. Since, as a visual artist, I lack the compositional tools for harmonization and orchestration, it made sense to work with a ready-made material. My music is always about observing processes. The source material is arbitrary, as it has no intrinsic aesthetic value. So the focus is not on the sound as such, but rather on the processes conducted within the sound. The selection of the material follows pragmatic criteria: it must be suitable for carrying out the corresponding processes.
I have developed a form type for this, which I call 'column form'. The 'column' is formed by a single bar cut out of an orchestral piece of my choice. The process consists of shifting the individual instrumental parts against each other from bar to bar according to a certain formula, so that each time new harmonies and timbres are created.
