Dirk Reith

Born in 1947; Dirk Reith is a German composer and university teacher. He studied composition with Milko Kelemen at the Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf, sound engineering alongside it, and from 1974 to 1976 computer composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute of Sonology of Utrecht University. In the early 1970s he built up the Electronic Studio of the Folkwang-Hochschule; as professor of composition he directed the Institut für Computermusik und Elektronische Medien that grew out of it until October 2011. He was a founding member of the Gesellschaft für neue Musik Ruhr, founded the november music festival with Dietrich Hahne in 1997 and created the international EX MACHINA festival. His composing is devoted to mechanical instruments and electronics, multimedia stage projects and algorithmic composition; his students include Achim Bornhöft, Ludger Brümmer and Dietrich Hahne. Seven albums connect him with Cybele. Five of them belong to the ex machina series, which bears the same name as the festival he founded: the volumes le son qui s’arrête le son éclaté and tangent (both 1996) and The Seventies, The Eighties and The Nineties (all 2001). To these are added Günther Becker’s Collected Works with the electroacoustic music (2004), where he is responsible for the sound engineering, and a contribution to the audiobook production Weht ein Stadtspaziergang durch den Traum (2014).