Harald Muenz

Born in Schwäbisch Hall in 1965; Harald Muenz is a composer, author and lecturer. He studied recording engineering and composition in Detmold, Cologne and Stuttgart with Krzysztof Meyer, Helmut Lachenmann and Hans Ulrich Humpert. At the centre of his work stand composition with language, Ars Acustica and forms of musical narration. His works combine instrumental, vocal and electronic means. He gained the composition diploma with Krzysztof Meyer in Cologne in 1993, where he also studied phonetics and sound direction with Georg Heike; from 1994 to 1997 Stuttgart followed. Seminars with Johannes Fritsch and Clarence Barlow completed his training. In 1997 he received the Förderpreis des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen and the Bernd-Alois-Zimmermann-Stipendium of the city of Cologne, in 2001 the Bennigsen-Foerder-Preis. From 2001 to 2005 he taught aesthetic phonetics at the Universität zu Köln, from 2005 to 2016 composition at Brunel University London; from 2006 to 2011 he directed the electronic studio of the Musikhochschule Lübeck, and from 2017 to 2022 he gave seminars at the Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie. Working residencies took him to Wiepersdorf in 1995, to the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles in 2000 and to the Atelier Galata in Istanbul in 2023. In 2002 he published a book on Franco Evangelisti. Three albums connect him with Cybele, and they lie where the two series with which the label documents electroacoustic music intersect: DEGEM Vol. 6, published as volume 3 of the Feedback Studio Köln series (2003), and the DEGEM volumes 90 Seconds of Reality (2005) and Orpheus 400 (2007).