

Beat Furrer
*6 December 1954
Works by Beat Furrer
Biography
1954 – Born December 6th in Schaffhausen, Switzerland
Throughout school simultaneous music courses at the Schaffhausen Music School (principal instrument: piano)
1975 – Moves to Vienna. Studies at the Music Academy in composition (Roman Haubenstock-Ramati) and conducting (Otmar Suitner)
1984 – Winner of the composition competition "The Young Generation in Europe," jointly sponsored by the City of Cologne, the Venice Biennale, and the Paris Festival d'Automne
1985 – Co-founder and Artistic Director of the instrumental ensemble Klangforum Wien (originally "Société de l'Art Acoustique"). Performances in Vienna's Secession museum and Concert House, as well as at festivals throughout Austria and abroad.
1989 – World premiere of the opera Die Blinden in Vienna (Odeon) as a commission by the Vienna State Opera
1991 – Instructor, after 1992 Professor for composition at the Graz Music Academy
1992 – Recipient of a Siemens Scholarship
1994 – World premiere of the opera Narcissus at the Opera House in Graz
1996 – Composer in residence at the Lucerne Festival. Featured Composer in the series "Next Generation" at the Salzburg Festival, World Premiere of nuun for two pianos and orchestra
1998 – 10 January, German Premiere of Narcissus in Bonn
2003 – Prize of the City of Vienna for Music
2005 – Member of the Berlin Academy of the Arts
2006 – Golden Lion of the Biennale di Venezia for FAMA
2006/2007 to 2009 – Visiting professor for composition at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts
2014 – Grand Austrian State Prize for Music
2018 – Ernst von Siemens Music Prize
Furrer is an Austrian citizen and lives in Kritzendorf near Vienna.
About the music
Beat Furrer was born in Schaffhausen, Switzerland in 1954 and moved to Vienna in 1975. To all intents and purposes he is an Austrian composer.
He studied composition with Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and they developed a close friendship based on mutual esteem which lasted until the older composer’s death in 1994. Thanks to Otmar Suitner, who taught him conducting, Furrer has been in a position to perform works by his professor on a regular basis. He is credited, for example, with the world première of the revised version of Haubenstock-Ramati’s opera Amerika in 1992.
In 1985, Furrer founded the new music ensemble Klangforum Wien, which he led a number of years both as artistic director and conductor. It testifies to his leadership as well as of that of his successors that the ensemble is still going strong and has established itself on the international scene as one of the best groups of its kind world-wide.
Furrer’s compositions were published by Universal Edition from the early 1980s until 1995. They include two operas (Die Blinden, 1989, and Narcissus, 1994), works for orchestra (Chiaroscuro, 1983/1986, Risonanze, 1988,Face de la chaleur, 1991, Madrigal, 1992, etc.) and for ensemble (A un moment de terre perdu, 1990, Narcissus-Fragment, 1993, Nuun, 1995/1996 and others), chamber music (two string quartets, a piano trio, a clarinet trio, etc) and works for solo instrument (piano as well as violoncello). In fact it is his Frau Nachtigall for violoncello solo, composed in 1982, that stands at the top of his official list of compositions. It is also his first work to have been published by Universal Edition.
Composition never came easily to Beat Furrer, nor is he always happy with the immediate result of his labours. Many of his scores have undergone revisions, some of them in several stages.
The music he wrote in the 1980s and 1990s was fragile, the dynamic range often on the soft side, the tones going beyond the scope defined by tradition, incorporating noises produced by unorthodox playing techniques, sometimes reminiscent of Helmut Lachenmann. However, Furrer is not shy to resort to powerful gestures, his first string quartet (1984) erupting at one point with unexpected aggression or in his ensemble work In der Stille des Hauses wohnt ein Ton (1987), the string tremoli and the flutter-tongue tones are suddenly interrupted by an infernal storm.
Furrer’s music tends to restrict itself to hints rather than making full-blown statements. In vocal works, too, the text is not necessarily set to carry a meaning. In Narcissus-Fragment, drawn from the eponymous opera, the two speakers utter syllables rather than complete words, as if in a desperate and ultimately abortive attempt at communication – a stuttering dialogue destined to fail.
In a way, you can describe Furrer’s oeuvre as ‘concept music’ in that each new work is based on a new concept – the composer sets great store by the search for new and flexible systems. He says:
“For each piece I want to create the material and the interrelationship of the intervals anew. Composing would not interest me if I had the impression that I was reproducing a well-worn concept rather than taking a step in a new direction. Surely, some works are recognizably linked together in that they spin on the same idea but always, that idea appears in a completely new light”.
However, Furrer never sticks rigidly to a new concept on which he is about to base a composition. “A concept devised in advance may in each of the different phases of work produce friction with the material. That is why I am always examining the relationship between the formal concept to the subjective need of expression, as a result revising and even discarding the concept. In other words, I never apply it slavishly but reserve for myself the freedom of decision. In this way, changes in the concept may become more important than the concept itself, for they may lead me to discover areas which I would never have visited.”
As many of his colleagues, the fine arts serve for Furrer as a source of inspiration. In composing Nuun (1996) for two pianos and ensemble, he had Yves Klein’s monochrome pictures in his mind. A first look at them reveals little of the pictures’ richness of detail, just as the mass of events that occur in Nuun initially renders the perception of motions and structures in the music well-nigh impossible. During the course of the work, layers are removed one after the other, but their energy continues to be there in the background, ready at any moment to re-emerge to the surface. Furrer sees his work as a composer partly as the realisation of different levels of energy.