Ralf Hoyer

Born in Berlin on 13 April 1950; Ralf Hoyer is a composer. He studied sound engineering at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and worked as a sound director at VEB Deutsche Schallplatten; from 1977 to 1980 he was a master student in composition with Ruth Zechlin and Georg Katzer at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Since then he has lived as a freelance composer in Berlin, writing for chamber ensembles, choir and orchestra, chamber opera and electronic music, as well as multimedia compositions and sound installations, often together with Susanne Stelzenbach. In 1991 he founded the Initiative Neue Musik Berlin, in 1994 the ensemble piano plus, and in 2002 he co-founded the Pyramidale festival; from 1995 to 1998 he chaired the Berlin section of the Deutscher Komponistenverband and from 2010 to 2013 the Berliner Gesellschaft für Neue Musik. He received the Hans Stieber Prize in 1983, the Hanns Eisler Prize in 1985 and the critics’ prize of the Berliner Zeitung in 1987; in 2006 he was given a mention at the 33rd International Competition of Electroacoustic Music in Bourges, and in 2015 he was a guest at the Casa Baldi. In the Cybele catalogue he appears on DEGEM Vol. 8 – 90 Seconds of Reality (2005) with the three parts of “ort.rand.” (2002) and on the audiobook Mirjam Wiesemann: Weht ein Stadtspaziergang durch den Traum (2014).