13 August 2019

Busoni Composition Prize 2019 awarded to Hanna Eimermacher
Advancement Prize awarded to Hovik Sardaryan

The Busoni Composition Prize 2019 has been awarded to Frankfurt-based composer Hanna Eimermacher. The prize is endowed with 6,000 euros. The 2,500-euro advancement prize has been awarded to Hovik Sardaryan from Armenia. The jury consisted of members of the Music Section, Hanspeter Kyburz, Cornelius Schwehr and Helmut Zapf.

By awarding the prize to Hanna Eimermacher, the Akademie honours a composer who is able to generate a living reality that cannot otherwise be experienced in her compositions – through moments of asynchronicity between eye and ear, through plastic corporeal sounds and spatial mobility. The music of the winner of the advancement prize, Hovik Sardaryan, is characterised by a special, powerful, sometimes melodic language, with hints of Armenian music.

Hanna Eimermacher was born in Duisburg in 1981 and grew up in Gelsenkirchen-Resse. Her studies in composition took her to Younghi Pagh-Paan and Charlotte Seither in Bremen, then to Pierluigi Billone and Beat Furrer in Graz and Mark Andre in Frankfurt. This was followed by an invitation from David Felder to come to the University at Buffalo, New York as a research scholar. She lectured there in 2016 at the June in Buffalo Festival, NY. Her works are performed internationally. Performance venues have included the Donaueschingen Festival, the Acht Brücken Ɩ Musik für Köln Festival, MaerzMusik, the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music and La Scala Paris. The Ictus Ensemble, Ensemble Modern, Ensemblekollektiv Berlin, Ensemble Contrechamps, Nieuw Ensemble and many more have performed Eimermacher's works. She has been awarded residential fellowships at Villa Massimo, Rome and Villa Concordia, Bamberg and the Berlin-Rheinsberg Composition Prize.

Hovik Sardaryan, born in 1993 in Armenia, studied composition at the State Conservatory of Yerevan under Ashot Zohrabyan from 2010-2014. In 2012, he won prizes at the international Renaissance competition (Gjumri, Armenia) and the EstoVest Festival (Turin, Italy). In 2014, he won first prize in the Sayat Nova International Composition Competition and was awarded the Armenian State Philharmonic Prize and the Carnegie Hall Award. In 2016, he participated in master classes with Carola Bauckholt, Oscar Bianchi and Fabien Lévy and in a workshop with Toshio Hosokawa and Péter Eötvös in Budapest, where he met György Kurtág. From 2015-2018, Hovik Sardaryan was a DAAD scholar and studied composition under Wolfgang Rihm at the Karlsruhe University of Music. He is currently studying music informatics focussing on sonic arts at the Karlsruhe University of Music.

The Busoni Composition Prize was instituted by Aribert Reimann in 1988 and is awarded to young composers who are as yet unknown to the public at intervals of two to three years. The last winners were Benjamin Scheuer and Óscar Escudero (2017). With this award, the Akademie is supporting the next generation of compositional talent; composition students have also been supported since 1992.

This year's award ceremony will take place on 15 November 2019, 8 pm at the Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz.