Michael von Biel

Born in Hamburg on 30 June 1937; Michael von Biel is a composer and visual artist. He studied in Toronto, Vienna, New York with Morton Feldman, London and Cologne with Karlheinz Stockhausen, among other places, and attended the Darmstädter Ferienkurse für Neue Musik from 1961 to 1963, where he received the composition prize in 1962 and where his “Book for three” for three pianos was premiered in the same year; he recorded the piece, dedicated to David Tudor, himself at Radio Copenhagen in 1963 using playback technique. In 1964 he received a composition commission from the Westdeutscher Rundfunk, and in 1965/66 he was composer in residence at the State University of New York in Buffalo. From 1966 he lived in Cologne, where he came into contact with artists of the Fluxus movement; in 1968/69 he studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and has since worked mainly in the visual field, though he continued to write occasional string quartets as well as guitar and piano pieces. From 10 to 12 February 2023 the Kölner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik devoted the festival “Abschied von der neuen Musik?” to him. Three albums connect him with Cybele, and all belong to the Feedback Studio Köln series: the sampler for the studio’s twenty-fifth anniversary (1996), DEGEM Vol. 6 (2003), to which he contributes a piano piece using playback technique, and a volume of his own with his Cellomusiken 1970/71 (2006), which he recorded himself on the cello. The production was supported by the Kunststiftung NRW.