Alexander Schubert

Alexander Schubert was born in Bremen. He studied Bioinformatics in Leipzig, then spent a year at the Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe at the Institute of Music and Acoustics.[4] He received a doctorate in multimedia composition at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, studying under Georg Hajdu and Manfred Stahnke.[5] He teaches at the Musikhochschule Hamburg,[6] directs the electronic studio at Musikhochschule Lübeck[7] and has been a visiting lecturer at Darmstadt International Summer Courses.[8] A founding member of ensembles Decoder, Trnn, Schubert-Kettlitz-Schwerdt, and Ember, he has also pursued an experimental pop music solo project under the name Sinebag.[9]

Schubert's pieces have been performed at several international institutions, including Wien Modern,[10][11][12] ICMC,[13] SMC,[14] Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival,[15] DLF Forum neuer Musik,[16][17] IRCAM,[18][19][20] ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival,[21][22] and Blurred Edges in Hamburg.[23]

Jennifer Walshe, Matthew Shlomowitz and Zubin Kanga have situated Schubert within what Walshe terms "The New Discipline" of contemporary music, alongside such composers as James Saunders and François Sarhan.[24][25] Shlomowitz writes,

The remit of New Music has moved on and broadened out in the twenty-first century. Composers such as Joanna Bailie, Michael Beil, Johannes Kreidler and Jennifer Walshe have created work that: engages popular and everyday culture; develops historical ideas from the visual arts (e.g. conceptualism); utilises technology to create new musical instruments; combines field recordings with music to form new relationships between music and the world; and establishes a music-led interdisciplinary practice with multimedia and theatricalised works. Whilst evidently connected to each of these trends, Alexander Schubert's work is a distinctive voice within this milieu.[26]

Schubert's music makes extensive use of multimedia, including live video, internet-sourced content, lighting, and motion sensors.[27][28] Praised by some commentators for its fusion of avant-garde and pop styles,[29][30] immersive qualities,[31][32] and distinctive engagement with the internet,[33][34] Schubert's critics have found his work excessively confrontational[35] or conceptual.[36]

In 2009, Schubert won the Bourges Residency Prize, and his piece Nachtschatten (Nightshade) placed in the Canadian Electroacoustic Community "Jeu de temps" competition.[37] He won the European Conference of Promoters of New Music competition in 2012[38] and a Giga-Hertz Production Award in 2013.[39] Wiki-Piano.Net received an honorary mention in the 2019 Prix Ars Electronica.[40]

Schubert has published articles on virtuality, post-digitality and multimedia composition. A collection of texts can be found in his book Switching Worlds.

• Official website
• "Alexander Schubert (biography, works, resources)" (in French and English). IRCAM.
• Interactive score for Wiki-Piano.net