Chaya Czernowin

Chaya Czernowin studied in Israel, then continued her work and studies in Germany, the United States and Japan. Her work is characterized by the use of metaphor as a means of reaching and analyzing an unknown sound world. She uses noise and physical parameters such as weight, surface’s texture, and time to create a visceral, instant sound experience that goes beyond style, conventions, or rationality. From 1997 to 2005, she held a professorship at UCSD and was the first woman to be appointed professor of composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna where she worked from 2006 to 2009. Since 2009, she has been teaching at Harvard University as the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music. Together with Steven Kazuo Takasugi and Jean-Baptiste Jolly, she founded the Summer Academy for Composers at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. Czernowin’s oeuvre includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics, and her works have been performed at most major new music festivals. Her music has been performed worldwide by the finest orchestras and interpreters of new music. In 2005/2006, she was appointed Artist in Residence at the Salzburg Festival, in 2013 at the Lucerne Festival, and in 2021 at the Huddersfield Festival. In addition to numerous other prizes, Czernowin represented Israel at the UNESCO’s Rostrum of Composers in 1980, was a DAAD fellow from 1983 to 1985, and was awarded the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis in 1992. In 2003, she won the Siemens Foundation Award, the Rockefeller Foundation Award in 2004, the Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 2011 and the Heidelberger Kunstlerinen Preis in 2016. She became a member of the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin in 2017 and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2021. In 2022, she received the Gema Authors Prize in the Musiktheater (new opera) category.