Search

    Composer Seminar

    © Peter Fischli/Lucerne Festival
    © Peter Fischli/Lucerne Festival

    As established by the late Wolfgang Rihm, every summer since 2016 the Lucerne Festival Academy has been offering a two-week-long Composer Seminar. Starting in 2025, it will be led by Dieter Ammann, who will conduct the seminar together with Unsuk Chin. During the first week, the participants discuss their works in plenary sessions open to the public as well as in one-on-one meetings. They then proceed to rehearse and prepare their scores with the accomplished musicians of the IEMA (Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie) and the young conductors of the Contemporary-Conducting Program, before finally presenting them to the Festival audience. Through this process, the participants receive valuable feedback on the practical implementation of their musical ideas.

    “You must learn composing through praxis”
    Wolfgang Rihm

    “One always hears it asserted: ‘Young composers all do the same thing.’ On the other hand, my experience is of different worlds, as if they came from different planets,” Wolfgang Rihm once observed when describing his impression of the emerging generation of composers. This variety of voices likewise characterizes the Composer Seminar, which Rihm founded in 2016. No aesthetic dogmas are prescribed here; instead, the seminar encourages “the articulation of one’s own voice.” Which is why “composers from different states of development and consciousness” are selected. The principle formulated by Wolfgang Rihm likewise applies to the Composer Seminar now being conducted by Dieter Amman and Unsuk Chin. 

    Glencore International AG – Partner Composer Seminar

    • Participants 2025

      Zixuan Chen (CN/US) | Mikel Iturregi (ES/FR) | Egemen Kurt (TR/AT) | Joonghyun Lee (KR) | Maya Miro Johnson (US) | Jaebong Rho (KR/US) | Agnes Vranceanu (RO) | Julia Constance Wiger-Nordås (NO)

    • Participants 2024

      Christoph Baumgarten (DE) | Sebastian Black (GB / NZ) | Che Buford (US) | Coral Douglas (US) | Hyeokjae Kim (KR) | Seungju Noh (KR) | Ingrid Saldaña (CL) | Tianyu Zou (CN)

      Anniversary Edition of the Composer Seminar for orchestra
      Yixuan Hu (CN) | Eden Lonsdale (DE / UK) | Kenta Onoda (JP) | Jose Luis Valdivia Arias (ES)

    • Participants 2023

      Kristupas Bubnelis (LT) | José Manuel Castro Brandão (PT) | Bo Huang (CN) | Sofia Ouyang (US) | Francisco Pais (PT) | Alyssa Regent (FR) | Lukas Stamm (CH) | Abigél Varga (HU)

    • Participants 2022

      Olivia Bennett (US) | Pengyi Li (CN) | Zhenyan Li (CN) | Minzuo Lu (CN) | Aregnaz Martirosyan (AM) | Lila Quillin (US) | Hugo Van Rechem (FR) | Raimonda Ziukaite (LT) 

    • Participants 2021

      Arnau Brichs (ES) | Tyson Davis (US) | Lanqing Ding (CN) | Theophilus Finkel (UK) | Anton Koshelev (UA) | Guillem Palomar Anglí (ES) | Daniil Posazhennikov (RU) | Senay Uğurlu (TR)

    • Participants 2019

      Dahae Boo (DE) | Sarah Lianne Lewis (GB) | Alessandro Batticci (AT) | Christoph Blum (CH) | Adrian Laugsch (DE) | Żaneta Rydzewska (PL) | Polina Korobkova (RU) | Michael Seltenreich (US)

    • Participants 2018

      Samir Amarouch (FR) | Nathanael Gubler (CH) | Andrew Haig (US) | Lise Morrison (NL) | Alsu Nigmatullina (RU) | Andrés Nuño de Buen (DE) | Alex Vaughan (DE) | Ivan Vukosavlijevic (NL) | Yiqing Zhu (CN)

    • Participants 2017

      Elias Jurgschat (DE) | Hanan Hadžajlić (BA) | Adrien Trybucki (FR) | Deok-Vin Lee (AT) | Alex Nante (FR) | Adrian Kleinlosen (DE) | Bianca Bongers (NL) | Leander Ruprecht (DE) | Yu Kuwabara (JP) | Sonja Mutić (RS)

    • Participants 2016

      Piyawat Louilarpprasert (TH) | Georgia Koumará (GR) | Nicolas Kuhn (DE) | Josep Planells (ES) | Kathrin A. Denner (DE) | Franz Rieks (DE) | Victor Coltea (RO) | Anna Korsun (UA) | Patrick Brennan (IE/GB) | Bella Máté (HU) | Michaela Catranis (US) | Mark Simpson (UK)