Ulf-Diether Soyka
*5 June 1954
Works by Ulf-Diether Soyka
Biography
Freelance composer in Vienna since 1983. Since 2000 until 2020 lecturer for composition and music theory at two conservatories in Vienna, from 2010 also high school teacher. Director of a church choir, board member of the Austrian Composers' Association (serious music), lectures at English and Australian music universities. Music journalism (Ö.Musikzeitschrift, Die Furche, Die Presse, etc.). He has led music symposia and has held positions in AKM, ÖGZM and the Music Trade Union. Lecturer at the Vienna Summer Seminars for New Music. Founded an ensemble for new music. 1983 Austrian state scholarship for composition. Choir director and conductor (first performances of 1938 expelled composers, etc.). Diploma studies with Friedrich Cerha (composition) and Otmar Suitner (orchestral conducting), and music education at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. Lecturer there from 1979 to 1981. Education at the Conservatory of the City of Vienna. School attendance and Humanistic Matura in Vienna.
About the music
Werner Pelinka described Ulf-Diether Soyka's compositional style in the cultural magazine morgen in 1987: "Soyka's music is committed to dodecaphony, but not to dogmatic serialism, but to an extended twelve-tone style, which is determined by melodic and rhythmic ideas, by feeling. This component, connected to the "emotio", causes a spontaneous understanding in the listener, even if he is not able to follow the structures and details guided by the "ratio". His tonal language is varied, both melodious and tonally beautiful as well as rhythmically lively and powerful.[ Soyka explored - on this basis - connections between diatonics, chromatics and microtonal music and has published micro-intervallic chamber music works since 2007, including in his (very melodic) opera "Ninja" (in which microtonality is assigned to a "main character", the robot androido, as a leitmotif), performed in concert in Birmingham in 2012.
Intercultural microtonal and dodecaphonic cadential music
The composer prefers live music to recorded music. From very simple to very complicated - everything is possible and fits together: Musical style change as a special interest - on the basis of diverse music-theoretical analyses of different musical traditions (starting from Alban Berg's twelve-tone cadenza, which is the basis for the liberation of melodic-rhytghmic incidence). Musical contrasts in the short compositions, shapes of comprehensive forms in which tonal languages can contrast or be transformed into each other.
1st piano concerto, CD 1987 (conductor Oliver v. Dohnanyi, soloist Alma Sauer), string orchestra suite for Göppingen (D) 1990, ballet DAS IDOL for Stadttheater Klagenfurt 1990, 2nd piano concerto for Philharmonie Baku (D) 1990. Piano Concerto for Philharmonic Orchestra Baku (Azerbaijan) 1993, "missa confort@mini Hofmusikkapelle Vienna 2001, Opera "Leyla" (Künstlerhaus) 2003, 2nd Violin Concerto - first performances in Australia, Brazil, France, Great Britain, Italy, Japan, Cuba, Norway a.o. - conducting activities with NÖ. Tonkünstlerorchester, Savaria Symphony Orchetsra, Philharmonic Orchestra Plovdiv a.o.