Category: Uncategorized

Luisa Santacesaria is a musician and musicologist. She studied piano at Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and graduated at the Department of Musicology and Cultural Heritage of Cremona (University of Pavia) with a MA thesis on the relationship between sound and space in electro-acoustic music. She was music curator of the Luigi Pecci Center for Contemporary Art in Prato (2016-2017). She currently collaborates as a musicologist with the Amici della Musica di Firenze concert season, the Centro Studi Luciano Berio, and with the research center Tempo Reale, where she curates the experimental music concert season TRK. Sound Club and the website musicaelettronica.it. Since 2015, she is a member of the collective of musicians Blutwurst.

Lucien Danzeisen is a composer and artist. Lucien took part in ‘The Young Composers Project’ (Künstlerhaus Boswil) and completed their bachelor’s degree in composition (Josef Kost, Michel Roth, Bettina Skrzypczak) and piano (Yvonne Lang, Marc Hunziker) with a minor in harpsichord (Bettina Seeliger) at the Hochschule für Musik Luzern in the Department of Classical Music. From 2012-2014, they were based inBasel. They completed their master’s degree in composition at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler Berlin with Hanspeter Kyburz. They are currently teaching at the UdK Berlin as part of FEM_*MUSIC*_, and are a member of the Insubordination Meta Orchestra in Geneva. Lucien has given concerts in Switzerland, Germany, Finland, Poland, France, and the Czech Republic, and focuses on composition and free improvisation.

Julia Eckhardt is a musician and curator in the field of the sounding arts and at the intersection of composed and improvised music. She is a founding member and artistic director of Q-O2 workspace in Brussels, for which she conceptualized different thematic projects such as Field Fest, Tuned City Brussels, Interpretations., the other the self, //2009//- what do you make of what I say, DoUndo/Recycling G, Abstract Adventures, De Tijd is Rond, Spelling.

As a performer of composed and improvised music she has collaborated extensively with composer Eliane Radigue, next to other artists such as Phill Niblock, Pauline Oliveros, Jennifer Walshe, Wandelweiser-composers, Rhodri Davies, Taku Sugimoto, Manfred Werder, Angharad Davies, Lucio Capece, Manu Holterbach, Anne Wellmer, Carol Robinson, several of them being represented on recordings.

She has been teaching and lecturing at Lemmens Institut (Leuven), Transmedia (LUCA Brussel) and La Cambre (Brussels). She is the author of The Second Sound, conversation on gender and music, together with Leen De Graeve (Umland), and of Grounds for Possible Music (Errant Bodies).

Irena Müller-Brozovic, wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin Hochschule für Musik FHNW in Basel und Dozentin für Musikvermittlung an der Hochschule der Künste Bern. Studium der Schulmusik und Instrumentalpädagogik (Klavier) in Basel sowie Musikvermittlung in Detmold. Langjährige Praxis als Schulmusikerin (Sekundarstufe I und II) und als Leiterin interdisziplinärer partizipativer Kulturvermittlungsprojekte (u. a. mit dem Sinfonieorchester Basel, dem Kammerorchester Basel und der Basel Sinfonietta), 2007 ausgezeichnet mit dem „Junge Ohren Preis“. Vorstandsmitglied von „Kulturvermittlung Schweiz“ und Mitglied von „Musikvermittlung Schweiz+“. Derzeit Promotion in Musikpädagogik an der Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien.

Gina Emerson is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology at the Institute for Cultural Innovation Research at Hamburg University of Music and Drama. She has been working with the Ulysses Network since November 2016 and is writing her doctoral thesis, ‘Receiving the Contemporary: Investigating Audiences for Contemporary Classical Music’, as part of the Network’s Audience Research project. For this, she is conducting audience surveys at twelve contemporary classical music concerts from a range of institutions across Europe, including IRCAM, the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, Snape Maltings and the Ultima Festival.

Prior to this, she was a Research Associate with the 3DMIN (Design, Development, and Dissemination of New Musical Instruments) project at the Technical University of Berlin. She holds an MA in Musicology from the Humboldt University of Berlin and a BA in Music from the University of Oxford. Her research interests include 20th/21st-century art music, empirical aesthetics, audiovisual music perception and the reception of contemporary music and new music technologies.

Désirée Meiser is the initiator, co-founder and artistic director of Gare du Nord, the new music station in Basel.

She completed her degree in acting at the University of Music and Theater Hannover. After her involvement at the Staatstheater Darmstadt in 1988, she worked with Frank Baumbauer at the Theater Basel, until 1993. In the following years, she worked as a singer, actress and/or director, especially in the field of music theater. Since the opening of the Gare du Nord in 2002, she (until 2008 together with the dramaturg Ute Haferburg) is the artistic director. Over the past 15 years, she has staged several music theater productions and successively established the ‘Gare du Nord’ as a venue for contemporary music theater with the series of musical theater forms.

Dr. Christina Scharff is Senior Lecturer in Culture, Media and Creative Industries at King’s College London. Her research interests are in gender, media, and culture with a focus on engagements with feminism and the politics of creative work. Christina is the author of Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World (Ashgate, 2012) and, most recently, Gender, Subjectivity, and Cultural Work: The Classical Music Profession (Routledge, 2018). She co-edited (with Rosalind Gill) the books New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism (with Ana Sofia Elias and Rosalind Gill) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Digital Feminisms: Transnational Activism in German protest cultures (with Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle).

Christina Lessiak BA MA, born in Klagenfurt, is a musicologist, pop-musician, songwriter, event engineer, and cultural worker. She studied Musicology and Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Karl Franzens University of Graz, University for Music and Performing Arts Graz and Aarhus University/Denmark. In her academic work, she focuses on issues of gender and inequality. Currently, she is working with the compositionist and co-researcher Pia Palme on the project “On the fragility of Sounds” (funded by the Austrian Science Fund FWF) which takes place at the University for Music and Performing Arts Graz. Here she focuses on the issues of composing, feminism and autoethnography.

Camilla Overgaard is a Danish songwriter, guitarist, and entrepreneur, currently studying her master at The Royal Academy of Music Aarhus/Aalborg (RAMA) in Denmark. In her songwriting, she reflects on society and has collaborated with musicians from different genres, actors and architects. As a member of the AEC Entrepreneurship Working Group and the AEC Student Working Group within the framework of the project Strengthening Music in Society, Camilla seeks to explore new ways of thinking within higher music education in order to help bring value to society.

Bastian Zimmermann is one of the co-editors of the magazine Positionen. He often works as a dramaturg for musical-performative settings and curates the series Music for Hotel Bars.