Olga Neuwirth

Olga Neuwirth is a contemporary Austrian composer known for her chamber music, film scores, and theatrical works. She also explores the boundaries between music and the visual arts with her immersive sound installations. She was born in Graz in 1968, into a family of musicians and artists. She started to learn the trumpet when she was seven years old, but abandoned the instrument after an injury to her jaw left her unable to play in 1983. As a teenager, she became interested in composing and attended composition workshops led by Gerd Kuhr and Hans Werner Henze. She began collaborating with Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek in 1984, and in 1985 she received her first commission for the Steirischer Herbst Festival. She spent the following year in the U.S., where she attended the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and studied with Elinor Armer. She returned to Vienna in 1987 and finished her education at the University of Music and Performing Arts with Erich Urbanner. In the 1990s she studied with Dieter Kaufmann, Wilhelm Zobl, and Tristan Murail, and she also received some mentorship from Luigi Nono and Adriana Hölszky. She worked in Paris at the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music, and it was around this time when she composed ...?risonanze!..., Photophorus, and the theatrical work Bählamms Fest. Her music was featured on several albums in the 2000s, which include Olga Neuwirth: Clinamen/Nodus; Construction in Space with Pierre Boulez and Emilio Pomárico, Olga Neuwirth: Bählamms Fest with Klangforum Wien, and Johannes Kalitzke’s Olga Neuwirth: Lost Highway. She also created the installations ...le temps désechanté ... ou dialogue aux enfers in 2005 and …miramondo multiplo… in 2007. Neuwirth was awarded numerous prizes in the 2010s including the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis, the Deutscher Musikautorenpreis, and her film scores Das Vaterspiel and Ich she Ich she were both nominated for the Österreichischer Filmpreis. In 2021, she was named Opus Klassik composer of the year and began an appointment as a professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Her opera Orlando earned her the 2022 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, and she was also awarded the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. Her Magic Flu-idity, for flute & typewriter was featured on Claire Chase’s 2023 release Density 2036: VI, VII, VIII.
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