Née en 1963 à Schlüchtern, dans la Hesse, Isabel Mundry grandit à Berlin où, de 1983 à 1991, elle suit des études de composition à la Hochschule der Künste. Elle obtient ses diplômes de fin d'études avec Frank Michael Beyer et Giista Neuwirth, puis mène des études complémentaires auprès de Hans Zender à la Musikhochschule de Francfort-sur-le-Main entre 1991 et 1994. Au cours de sa formation, elle travaille à plusieurs reprises au studio de musique électronique de la Technische Universitat de Berlin, ainsi qu'au studio de Freiburg.
Après des études de musicologie (avec Carl Dahlhaus), d'histoire de l'art et de philosophie à la Technische Universitat de Berlin, elle est ensuite chargée de cours de théorie de la musique et de cours d'analyse à la Kirchenmusikschule (école de musique liturgique) entre 1986 et 1993, matières qu'elle enseigne également dès 1991 à la Hochschule der Künste de Berlin. Elle réside à Paris entre 1992 et 1994, où elle suit une formation à l'IRCAM. De 1994 à 1996 elle est à Vienne, puis de 1996 à 2004, enseigne la composition à la Musikhochschule de Francfort. Elle a aussi enseigné en 1997 au Festival d'Akiyoshidai (Jopon), et aux Ferienkurse für Neue Musik de Darmstadt (1998, 2000 et 2002).2004 Isabel Mundry a occupé une chaire de professeur à la Musikhochschule de Zurich. En 2007, elle a été compositrice en résidence à la Staatskapelle de Dresde. Depuis 2011, elle est professeur de composition à la Musikhochschule de Munich.
Isabel Mundry a remporté de nombreux prix et bourses, parmi lesquels, la bourse de composition du Berliner Senat, le prix de composition de la Ville de Berlin (1993), le prix Boris Blacher, le Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1996), prix musical Ernst von Siemens (2001), prix des artistes de la Ville de Heidelberg (2011) et le prix d'auteur d'allemand de GEMA (2014).
NOTICE
Nocturno, a piece for orchestra, was created February 16, 2006 in Chicago by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim.
"As the concertos for Mozart, the spicy but atmospheric of "Nocturno" of Mundry requires relatively little strength. The orchestra has been widely divided on stage, with a group of seven solo instruments including a piano placed at the far right of stage of Barenboim. The musicians who are grouped in two small ensembles, are grouped to the left well behind the stage.
"Nocturno" explores the relationship silence / sound, but Barenboim has built a long-periodic 'accoustical' gesture. The strings range from "a tense barking" and a nauseous sound; and the percussion between crying and a smooth murmuring. The energy builds up and decreases, but a strange feeling of expectation fills the air."
(translation made from an article by Wynne Delacoma in the Chicago Sun-Times)
Duration: approximately 14 minutes
WORLD PREMIERE
2/22/2013: Premiere (Order from Musica Viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk), piano: Nicolas Hodges
NOTES
I do not have any trouble finding words to speak about some of my compositions. At the origin of those there are reflections, which can be described by the language, even if in the second time the music is withdrawn again from the language.
For Non-Places, a concerto for piano, the words remain distant from me, even if some of them are pronounced inside the music. If I were to describe the nature of this part, I would prefer to concentrate on the process of its creation. The origin of Non-Places is to be sought in the concerto for piano “Moi et toi” that I composed in 2008. In this new version, it is not a question of widening and of revising what exists already, but of giving a second prospect for this theme. It is thus about a second piece, which leaves all its value to the first, because he is located elsewhere. For that, I took again some passages of the first work, left side the majority of them and rewritten as a whole piece. In the preceding piece, I had placed the double concept me and you as a thinking figure of all the decisions referring to the composition. In this case I did not want that the piano and the orchestra to represent the opposition of the individual and the mass, but on the contrary to symbolize two prospects having echo and which report can be driven in a moving spectrum from attraction to repulsion, from tenderness to violence.
And it was important to me also to understand how the two sides, the “Me” and the “You”, could respectively act as a principle in each one of them. And this is the starting point of the new composition. It is less about the evolutionary glance focused on a contrast, than about the clean evolution of the being which implies obviously a modified glance on the rest. I want to speak about the changing identity. That could seem abstracted at the first time, but thanks to the music it can be described in a very concrete way.
She questions herself, begins with daily commons noises such as a cracking, a conversation, a laughter, a pinking or digital sounds. Slowly these sounds are built-in musical contours. That could enter a before/after process, from not-music to music. However these sounds will resound again later, not as if they had been stored, but like coming from the music. They are the same sounds, but they became of different nature, like other elements of the composition besides. In the same way, the harmony moves, lets the tonality appear then disappear, not like a quote or a melancholic historical place, but like a possibility, among others, in the way the sounds can be born and disappear. I would compare here the piano more to a wire, which by all these modifications is tightened, but also colours itself. Non-places - this concept comes from sociology and indicates places, almost immaterial, because they do not constitute identity. They are transitional places, like the halls of airport, the chains of hotels and the commercial arcades. The oeuvre plays occasionally with these associations. One could think that in such places the Being disappears. However one can also describe them like blank, in which the Being becomes again possible and can evolve. At the beginning of the composition one hears a diffuse conversation, then arrives a spoken text, in fact some passages of the lyric work of Oswald Egger. They end in the words “Nothing, that is”. One could give a melancholic sense to these words. For me they are synonymous with beauty.
Isabel Mundry (2012)