Alex Nowitz is a composer and vocal performance artist, improvisor, sound artist and musician. His compositions comprise of vocal and instrumental chamber music, full-length operas, orchestral and electroacoustic music, including music for dance performances and spoken theater. As a vocal performance artist, he focuses on the tenor and countertenor voice and uses a variety of extended vocal techniques. In his compositions and his vocal performance art, he explores the notion of ‘multivocality’. In spring 2019, he received a Doctoral Degree in Performative and Mediated Practices with Specialization in Opera for his work “Monsters I Love: On multivocal arts’ from the Stockholm University of the Arts.

Works/Premieres (Selection)

2019 | Vocal Space Lines, featuring voice, live electronics (strophonion) and four loudspeakers; interpreter: Alex Nowitz; premiere: ‘100 years of bauhaus’ at the Berlin Academy of Arts

2018 | Moving Tongues: Playing Space, full-length solo performance featuring voice, live electronics (strophonion) and video; interpreter: Alex Nowitz; premiere: Reaktorhallen Stockholm

2017 | Bewegungsstudien [motion studies], music for four musicians and their voices (soprano saxophone, trombone, violoncello, accordion); interpreter: ensemble LUX:NM Berlin; premiere: ‘intersonanzen’ at the art gallery ‘sans titre’ Potsdam

2016 | Kaspar, a scene for piano, violoncello and cor anglais; interpreter: Ensemble Mosaik Berlin; premiere: ‘intersonanzen’ at the ‘fabrik’ Potsdam

2013 | Traumnovelle [dream novella], music theatre consisting of 16 scenes for three female singers, four male singers, 14 musicians and fixed sounds; libretto: Maxi Obexer adapted from the novella with the same title by Arthur Schnitzler; premiere: Brunswick State Theatre

2006 |  Die Bestmannoper [the opera on the best man], 13 scenes for 14 solo singers, female and male choir, orchestra and theremin; libretto: Ralph Hammerthaler; premiere: Theater Osnabrück; opera on Nazi criminal and mass murderer from Austria Alois Brunner and his persecutor, French lawyer from Paris, Serge Klarsfeld


Awards (Selection)

2014 | Cité Internationale des Arts Paris: artist residency appointed by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media of Germany, Bernd Neumann

2013/2012/2010/2009 | EMS Stockholm [Elektronmusikstudion]: artist residencies for various multichannel compositions

2010-2011 | STEIM Amsterdam [Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music]: artist residency and grant for research and development of the live electronics, called ‘strophonion’

2009 | First prize of the ECPNM [European Conference of Promoters of New Music] as part of the ISCM [International Society for Contemporary Music] World New Music Days in Gothenburg

2006/2002 | Schloss Wiepersdorf: artist residencies each supported by the Brandenburgian Ministry of Science, Research and Culture