Marcus Schmickler
Studio Piethopraxis
Marcus Schmickler is a composer-performer of contemporary and electronic music. He resides in Cologne and Vienna.
Schmickler merges computer music, ensemble composition, performance and scientific subjects. His multi-channel works have been performed on prestigious stages, creating unique auditory spaces. He explores techniques like Shepard tones and ring modulations, deepening his compositions through data sonification and otoacoustic emissions.
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 Graz. His compositions have been performed by renowned ensembles worldwide.
CV Works
- 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
The Great Wayfinders (Höhlenmusik)
Marcus Schmickler & Tim Berresheim – The Great Wayfinders I–IX (Cave Music)
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.
At the heart of the work is the figure of the Wayfinder, inspired by the fairy-tale siblings Hansel and Gretel. The libretto draws on motifs from Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel and Gretel. Guided by caring yet uncanny parental voices, children find their way through the “forest of unknown digital artifacts,” leaving a trail of breadcrumbs. Their journey through unfamiliar terrain subjects them to trials, during which they acquire a new language: that of digitality and machine learning.
The stage design, generated by Tim Berresheim, is based on data from cave surveys in the Danube Valley in Baden-Württemberg. Ensemble Musikfabrik brings the work to life with a striking palette of proto-futuristic instruments: from a reconstruction of the prehistoric “griffon vulture flute”—one of the oldest known musical instruments—to shells, bullroarers, bear bones, and unique instruments by the American composer Harry Partch. The Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart embody the opera’s protagonists.
Integral to the production is Schmickler’s distinctive electronic sound world, developed in part with the Institute for Music and Media Düsseldorf and the Next Generation Sound Synthesis Project (NESS) in Edinburgh.
In cooperation with Ensemble Musikfabrik, Neue Vocalsolisten, and Musik der Jahrhunderte
Commissioned by Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
Funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation
Tickets: €25 / €20