Marcus Schmickler
Studio PiethopraxisMarcus Schmickler, born in 1968, is a composer-performer of contemporary and electronic music. He resides in Cologne and Graz.
Schmickler merges computer music, ensemble composition, performance, visual elements 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 and at Robert Schumann Hochschule. His compositions have been performed by renowned ensembles worldwide.
CV Projects Text Discography
- 24.07.19 › Stuttgart › Villa Massimo and Musik der Jahrhunderte present Schreber Songs (Don't Wake Daddy)
- 24.04.13 › Weiwuying › Richters Patterns Installation presented by Weiwuying International Music Festival @ National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts , TWN
- 24.03.30 › Tongyeong › Richters Patterns Installation @Tongyeong International Music Festival (TIMF), KOR
- 24.02.16 › Düsseldorf › The Great Wayfinders Music for Tim Berresheim’s exhibition @ NRW Forum
- 24.01.19 › Köln › RAVE in the Style of G.M. Koenig (Bucklige Welt) @ JUBG , DEU - Solo-Exhibition until Feb 26
Projects
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.
Schreber Songs (Don’t Wake Daddy)
Monodrama with scenic elements based on the life 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.
Glockenbuch IV (Spectre Maria dei Carmini)
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.
The Great Wayfinders Höhlenmusik is a multi-part music and multimedia project, both a concert and an AV installation in a museum exhibition space.
The piece deals with music of a digital Stone Age (music as a resonance space of digital paleontology). Tim Berresheim's work serves as a backdrop and stage set that introduces and visually accompanies the thematic contexts of the piece.
Entwurf einer Rheinlandschaft (Draft of a Rhinelandscape)
Long-distance landscape performance, with long-range sound projection. For narrator, 5 solo singers, theatre-choir, singing choir, 2 conches, brass octet, percussion, electronic music, accordion orchestra, 2 boats, amateur musicians, fireworks. Dramatizing the concept of space, border, distance, proximity and distance, social distance, geographical distance, distance between cause and effect, as well as the state of liminality, in-betweenness.
90 min, Commisioned by Monheim Triennale
Kemp Echoes
Politiken der Frequenz
Politken der Frequenz ('Politics of Frequency') draws on concepts from economics and advanced mathematics, including the work of contemporary philosopher Alain Badiou, for a literal sonification of cutting-edge theory and the abstractions of the modern world. It involves clouds of data rendered in the primary colours of electronic synthesis alongside a chorus that chants numbers, argues points and asks 'Is it possible to perceive changes in a society through changes in its music? Is it possible to understand contemporary music through its implicit relationship with money?' The result is like a cross between reading a new manifesto and what Xenakis might have produced had he lived to be angry about the financial crisis. A must for readers of Badiou or Attali, Schmickler and Rohrhuber seem to have tapped into the very life of numbers and liquid cashflow itself.
Glockenbuch IV
Interview“I would like to start our conversation from the index from the index at the origin of the whole project, the Book of Bells of the City of Cologne. How did you discover it and how did this document stimulate your interest in the sound of bells?”A couple of years ago, my friend Regina Fiorito, told me about the book in one of our conversations. And I love indexical catalogues. When I got offered a commision for a new piece for St. Aposteln, the 2nd biggest church in my hometown, this instantly popped up. Maybe I like indices because this uniform iE-UROPAS (Plurality of Centers)
Chamber-Opera for five instrumental soloists, political speakers, electronic music, radios, video projections.
In bidding farewell to the 20th century, 'E-UROPAS' embarks on a multifaceted exploration, probing the boundaries of reality and concert, tradition and innovation. Through a fusion of disparate elements, it seeks to disrupt complacency and challenge preconceptions, signaling a departure from the familiar into the uncharted territories of contemporary musical expression.
Glockenbuch III
Omaggio à Roland Kayn (2022)13.1-channel computermusic based on resynthesis and physical models from plates. Villa Massimo, Rome.
“In paying tribute to Roland Kayn, Schmickler establishes a cultural link between Cologne and Rome. Kayn, a German organist and composer, specialized in electronic, electro-acoustic, and tape music, which he termed cybernetic music. In 1960, he was awarded a scholarship from the Villa Massimo, leading him to spend subsequent years in Rome and Venice. Four years later, he co-founded the ensemble Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza with Franco Evangelisti, counting Ennio Morricone and Frederic Rzewski among its members.”
Fortuna Ribbon
“The latter section’s ‘Fortuna Ribbon’ is where it goes beyond anything we’ve heard before, genuinely causing us to cut the sound multiple times to check that what we’re hearing isn’t some invasive background sound, but some of the very strangest sonic sensation imaginable. Seriously, we could swear there are planes droning overheard and some massive machinery whirring beautifully in the distance, but nein, it’s all in your head and quite honestly the maddest thing to experience.“
(as reviewed on boomkat.com)
Glockenbuch II (Spektren der Welten)
Semiotic Chora
Sky Dice / Mapping the Studio
11.2 channel audio. Commissioned by Donaueschinger Tage fur Neue Musik
Sky Dice / Mapping the Studio stages the history of live-electronic musicl production using the example of the SWR Experimentalstudio (EXP). The piece develops a fragmented acoustic map of the facility; here the studio serves as a model for the sonic depiction of historical signal paths.
Particle/Matter - Wave/Energy
How does it sound when galaxy clusters of 30 objects reciprocally influence each other by means of gravitation? We hear the collisions of first two and then three simulated galaxies. Gravitation is one of the forces in the universe with the greatest effect, and it appears to operate differently on Earth than it does on a grand scale between galaxies great distances apart. In April 2009 scientists of the Argelander Institute called Newton's law of gravity into question.
Revolving Realities
Nomadischer Rundfunk
Performance for FM Transmitter and Radios on the stairs of the WDR Funkhaus. In May 2021, the WDR Electronic Music Studio closed. Parts of historical apparatuses, developed by composers like Stockhausen, Koenig, Kagel and Ligeti were fed the trash or sold. Today, the 74th Birthday of long-time head of the studio, we will meet in order to realize the benefits of such an ensemble. You are requested to come in white garments.
Please bring portable FM Radios.
(Bonn Patternization) Composition based on the sonification of astronomical data.
10.2 channel audio
The analog-digital electronic duo of Marcus Schmickler and Thomas Lehn has been working since December 1998 during the German premiere of the Music In Movement Electronic Orchestra (aka MIMEO) in Cologne. Since then, they have been extensively touring in Europe, the USA and Japan
Video-Lecture-Performance based on Mauricio Kagel’s Film “Ludwig Van” by invitation of Akademie der Künste Berlin.
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.
Brass quartet, computer and remote soloist(s). "COULD YOU PATENT THE SUN?" is a
preview of Schmickler's "Entwurf einer Rheinlandschaft", Four brass players on the roof of the K714 interact with vocal Soloists from a distance, from the opposite side of the Rhine. At the same time the audience can log into one of several complementary web streams and listen to its sound from the Rhine promenade and distribute its sound in the urban space. The libretto is inspired by the famous response by American immunologist Jonas Salk, the maverick discoverer of the polio vaccine in the 1950s to the question of whether he had applied for a patent on his polio vaccine.
- Okkyung Lee, Jenifer Walshe, Janneke van der Putten Voice, - Brass players of Ensemble Musikfabrik (Christine Chapman (h), Maro Blauuw, Bruce Collings, Melvin Poore
Composition based on the topos of voice . ~52 minutes,
5.1 channel audio.
In addition to the reading of the voice as an aesthetic sound phenomenon or as a vehicle of linguistic meaning, there is another: it is neither language nor body, it forms a different space at their point of contact. The voice is a remnant, an object on which thought is trained. On this basis, COPULA E attempts to take considerations on the (keno)grammar and metaphysics of confusion, on the politics of the voice and on phonology literally and translate them back into sound. The source material are artificial voices on the one hand and formalisms of programming languages on the other.
“Galloway and Schmickler transform Busch/Brecht/Eisler's sense of mission into a sound of longing and confusion that is entirely appropriate for our times. And perhaps these kinds of deep house reverends are the only preachers who can still be believed. If what the GDR once called its humanist heritage is to be found anywhere, it is here.” Jungle World
Glockenbuch IV (Spectre Maria dei Carmini)
Schreber Songs (Don’t Wake Daddy)
Monodrama with scenic elements based on the life 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
The Great Wayfinders Höhlenmusik is a multi-part music and multimedia project, both a concert and an AV installation in a museum exhibition space.
The piece deals with music of a digital Stone Age (music as a resonance space of digital paleontology). Tim Berresheim's work serves as a backdrop and stage set that introduces and visually accompanies the thematic contexts of the piece.
Entwurf einer Rheinlandschaft (Draft of a Rhinelandscape)
Long-distance landscape performance, with long-range sound projection. For narrator, 5 solo singers, theatre-choir, singing choir, 2 conches, brass octet, percussion, electronic music, accordion orchestra, 2 boats, amateur musicians, fireworks. Dramatizing the concept of space, border, distance, proximity and distance, social distance, geographical distance, distance between cause and effect, as well as the state of liminality, in-betweenness.
90 min, Commisioned by Monheim Triennale
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.