Graduate Research Colloquium: Prof. Gerald Resch (University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna)

Free to attend, register here.

In 2020, the year of Beethoven’s anniversary, the Wiener Musikverein, one of Vienna’s biggest concert halls, commissioned a string quartet from Gerald Resch. The piece was supposed to reflect on the relevance of Beethoven for contemporary, modern composers. The Aris-Quartett, the quartet playing the first performance of Resch’s piece, was also going to perform Beethoven’s string quartet op 59/1 in the same concert. Hence, Resch decided to stick unusually close to the structural template laid out by this Beethoven quartet. He used Beethoven’s blueprint in an abstracted way for his own string quartet, titled ‘attacca’. This colloquium will demonstrate, how structural observations in Beethoven’s op. 59/1 can lead to new compositional solutions through conscious ‘creative misunderstanding’.

Professor Gerald Resch, born in 1975 in Linz, studied composition from 1993 to 2001 in Vienna, Cologne and Graz with Michael Jarrell, York Höller, Beat Furrer and others, as well as musicology, philosophy and art history at the University of Vienna. He teaches at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna and at the Anton Bruckner Private University in Linz. He has won a number of prizes and stipends including the Austrian State Stipend for Composition in 2003 and 2017, the Erste Bank Composition Prize in 2011 and the Hamburg Tonali Composition Prize in 2012. Since 2022 he is professor for composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

About the series:
The Colloquia feature leading figures, as well as younger scholars, from across the world. They present their research in papers on all kinds of music-related topics. Graduate student Judith Valerie Engel organises the series. Presentations are followed by a discussion and drinks reception. If you would like more information, please email judith-valerie.engel@chch.ox.ac.uk.