From 4 to 7 February of this year, the 6th Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition took place in the Fanny Hensel-Saal and was also streamed live on the Internet. Its jury, consisting of Annesley Black, Michael Jarrell, Isabel Mundry, Miroslav Srnka, and Marco Stroppa, publicly discussed the 14 compositions nominated for the final round, which saw them performed by students of the Ludwig van Beethoven Department of Piano in Music Education.
The competition’s first prize went to Damian Scholl (Germany) for his work Love Songs for piano eight hands. Two second prizes were awarded, to João Ricardo (Portugal) for his four-hand work What does the wall say? and to Raphael Vilani (Brazil) for his like… The third prize was won by Sean Cedric Schumann (Germany) for his six short pieces. Furthermore, the jury awarded an honourable mention to Sang hyun Hong (South Korea) for his Sechs Erinnerungen [Six Memories].
This competition once again attracted broad international participation, with over 200 compositions being submitted by a worldwide field of entrants from 55 countries. As the prize-winners unanimously emphasised, the two most important reasons to enter the Mauricio Kagel Composition Competition were its two unique characteristics:
- Anonymity and transparency: composers remain anonymous until the prize-winning compositions are announced, and their compositions’ evaluation as well as the entire decision-making process takes place in public.
- The compositional challenge: to create a piano work whose difficulty is deliberately limited (so as to be a suitable first contemporary piece for child or adolescent players) that still goes beyond being simply a learning-oriented instructional work to embody a composition of high artistic ambition.
Writing a piece that is not only playable but also enjoyable to practice and perform required the prize-winners to reorient their thinking, focusing not just on the aesthetic challenge but also on anticipating the perspective of those learners for whom these pieces would be among the—or, indeed, the—first experiences with contemporary piano music.
The requirement that submissions be “for one piano (solo or for more than one pianist)” was what inspired Damian Scholl to conceive his Love Songs for four players. On this, the composer says: “This decision helped me to limit myself in a natural way and avoid anything all too pianistically commonplace. Instead, I was able to rediscover the piano as a resonating object and draw on the sonic possibilities that eight hands open up. All of the musicians play as equals, here, with nobody ‘glued to the bench’; they all rotate, making acquaintance with every pianistic perspective.”
João Ricardo devoted himself to the serious theme of racially motivated violence against young people in Portugal in his work What does the wall say? To this end, the composer involved elements borrowed from thematically related songs like John Coltrane’s “Alabama”, Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit”, and Rage Against the Machine’s “Freedom”.
The other work that received a second prize, like…, consists of four miniatures that integrate various gestures and sounds. Composer Raphael Vilani used his work’s overall title to form a simile in the title of each miniature (as with the first, which is called “like a meteor shower”). At the same time, this title also refers to the frequent use of “like” as particle in spoken English (and to its equally common equivalent in Brazilian Portuguese).
Sean Cedric Schumann, in his six short pieces, sheds light on various aspects and techniques of contemporary piano-playing—from the first piece, which embodies an “overture” inspired by No. 1 of Schönberg’s Sechs kleine Klavierstücke op. 19, to the concluding piece with its experimental, beyond-the-keys exploration of the piano as a resonant space.
The prize-winning works will be published in cooperation with Universal Edition as the collected digital volume K2025. Additionally, audio recordings of these works will be available through the mdw-Audiothek as a digital release.
