Ann Cleare Awarded Ernst von Siemens Composers' Prize

Ann Cleare

Ann Cleare Awarded Ernst von Siemens Composers' Prize

Major contemporary music award includes a recording on the Kairos label.

Composer Ann Cleare has been announced as one of three recipients of the annual Ernst von Siemens Composers’ Prize. The major contemporary music prize is valued at €35,000 and includes a portrait album on the Austrian Kairos label to be released later this year.

The two other recipients are Annesley Black from Canada and Mithatcan Öcal from Turkey.

The Composers’ Prize from the German Ernst von Siemens foundation is awarded annually. There is also a main music prize which carries an award of €250,000 and which was awarded to British composer Rebecca Saunders earlier this year.

‘Concerned with energy, motion, space’
Ann Cleare, from Offaly, studied at University College Cork and at IRCAM in Paris and holds a PhD from Harvard University in the US. Her music has been widely performed and broadcast and includes works such as I should live in wires for leaving you behindI am not a clock maker either and FIÁIN.  She is currently Assistant Professor of Music and Media Technologies at Trinity College Dublin. 

In an essay specially commissioned for the prize, musicologist and violinist Gascia Ouzounian describes Cleare’s music as ‘an altogether different artform that draws from musical traditions, but pushes against and beyond them, articulating something that is at once about sound, but that is equally concerned with energy, motion, space – and the world itself?’

A prize-giving concert will take place in Munich on 7 June and will include a performance of Cleare’s on magnetic fields by German ensemble Musikfabrik. 

For more information, visit www.evs-musikstiftung.ch.

Published on 6 March 2019

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