Marcus Schmickler
Studio Piethopraxis
Marcus Schmickler works across contemporary and electronic music, combining computer-based composition, ensemble writing and scientific inquiry. His multichannel pieces have appeared on major international stages, often engaging with psychoacoustic and algorithmic phenomena such as Shepard tones, ring modulation and data sonification.
Schmickler writes on computer music and has won several prizes, including the Rome Prize. He taught at Bard College, at Calarts, at Robert Schumann Hochschule and IEM. His compositions have been performed by renowned ensembles internationally. He lives between Cologne and Vienna.
CV Works
- 20.12. › Dortmund, @Künstlerhaus
- 19.12. › Graz, Gendyn ∂ Institute (A Crypt) Institute for Sonic Welfare @DOM im Berg
- - Premiere-
- 21.09 › Stuttgart The Great Wayfinders I-IX (Höhlenmusik) @ Doppelte Käseplatte, Kunstmuseum-Stuttgart
- 20.09 › Stuttgart The Great Wayfinders I-IX (Höhlenmusik) @ Doppelte Käseplatte, Kunstmuseum-Stuttgart
- - Premiere-
- 11.07. › Vienna Sky Dice (Mapping the Studio) @ Parken
- 13.06. › Vienna Lecture-performance: ‘Genesis of a Music - Composing with Harry Partch’ as part of The Atlas @ WUK
- 09.05. › Graz, Crossroads Algorithms presents Sky Dice/ Mapping the Studio @ Kultum
The Great Wayfinders (Höhlenmusik)
Composer Marcus Schmickler and artist Tim Berresheim present a new chamber opera, premiering on September 20 and 21, 2025, at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart as part of the museum’s double anniversary celebrations.The Great Wayfinders I–IX (Cave Music) explores the meaning of digitality through the lens of cave research—casting a speculative gaze from the future back onto our present. Schmickler and Berresheim imagine that we are only at the dawn of a new epoch: the digital age. Centuries from now, today’s beginnings may appear as the “digital Stone Age,” awkward and archaic in hindsight.
Schreber Songs (Don’t Wake Daddy) / Stuttgarter Fassung
Chamber-Opera based on the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, a German judge who was famous for his personal account of his own experience with schizophrenia and Freud’s account of paranoia.Rave in the Style of G.M. Koenig
Solo exhibition at JUBG Gallery in Coloigne based on Realtime Autoencoders trained on Schmickler’s own music.
Richters Patterns
The composition 'extends' Gerhard Richter’s experiment of decomposing a reproduction of one of his 'Abstract Images' into vertical stripes around the domain of sound and time.
The music was not composed to an edited film, but instead Schmickler wrote the music in parallel with the film’s creation. Both, film and composition follow Richter’s method ‘divide, mirror repeat’ into the respective media, at times creating friction between images and sound. Thus listeners experience this music as if looking at a painting.