Michael Beil
Michael Beil studied piano and music theory at the Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart and afterwards composition with Manuel Hidalgo. In 1996, he taught music theory and composition at the music conservatories in Kreuzberg and Neukölln in Berlin as director of the precollege department and the department of contemporary music. At this time, Beil also directed the Klangwerkstatt – a contemporary music festival in Berlin – and founded in 2000 together with Stephan Winkler the team Skart to present concerts based on interdisciplinary concepts. In 2007, he became the professor for electronic music at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne and director of the studio for electronic music.
As composer Beil has collaborated with numerous ensembles and soloists. His music has been commissioned by festivals for contemporary music including Ultraschall in Berlin, ECLAT in Stuttgart or Wien Modern, and has been featured in portrait or concert broadcasts on several radio stations. Furthermore he has received scholarships for Künstlerhaus Wiepersdorf, Cité des Arts in Paris and the Heinrich-Gartentor-Scholarship for video art in Thun, Switzerland. In addition he participated in the Nachwuchsforum für junge Komponisten of the Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (GNM) in collaboration with the Ensemble Modern.
Beil’s work focuses on the combination of electronic music, instrumental music and video. His compositions are based on concepts concerning the situation on stage in a concert in connection with the development process of musical works. Therefore the instrumentalists are mostly involved in the compositional process and their participation is documented to be part of a composition. So the temporal formation and coherence of a musical work becomes perceivable and transparent for the audience in the performance. In order to do this Beil employs live and prerecorded audio and video. A further fundamental aim of his music is to call into question the art work as a masterpiece. With a view to this Beil engages exclusively with musical readymades by transforming or deconstructing familiar musical works or by techniques of displacing well known musical material or material that is idiomatic for a certain instrument in an unusual connotation.
As of January 2023