Chaya Czernowin

Education and early career

Czernowin was born and raised in Haifa, Israel. She studied composition at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel-Aviv University with Abel Ehrlich and Izhak Sadai, and at the age of 25 went to study in Berlin on a DAAD Scholarship with Dieter Schnebel. In 1986 she moved to the United States to study at Bard College with Eli Yarden and Joan Tower. She received her PhD at the University of California San Diego studying with Roger Reynolds (dissertation advisor) and Brian Ferneyhough. Upon completing her formal education, Czernowin undertook a period of travel and composition in Japan 1993-5 (Asahi Shimbun Fellowship, NEA Scholarship) and Germany (1996, Akademie Schloß Solitude). Czernowin describes this period of travel as being seminal in the development of her compositional language.

Czernowin considers teaching to be an important aspect of her continued compositional development. She was Professor of Composition at the University of California San Diego from 1997 to 2006, a professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna from 2006 to 2009, and in 2009 was appointed Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University. She has been a guest professor in a number of institutions, and has taught at the International Summer Course for New Music at Darmstadt since 1990. In 2003 Czernowin founded a course for young composers at the Akademie Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart with her husband, composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi, and Jean Baptiste Joly, as well as a course in Israel at the festival Tzlil Meudcan along with Yaron Deutsch.

Musical work

Czernowin’s output includes chamber and orchestral music, with and without electronics. Her works has been regularly played in most of the contemporary music festivals in Europe, as well as in Japan, Korea, Australia, the USA and Canada.

Opera

Czernowin has composed three large scale works for the stage: Pnima...ins Innere (2000), Adama (2004-05), and Infinite now (2016–17). All three carry strong political content.

Pnima...ins Innere was commissioned by the Munich Biennale and chosen as best premiere of the year by Opernwelt’s annual critic survey. It was also winner of the coveted Bayerischer Theaterpreis. Pnima deals with the transmission of a traumatic experience as a vital part of the present, demanding real and active engagement rather than allowing the trauma to become a self-important, rarefied and frozen memorial.

Adama was commissioned for Mozart’s 250’s birthday by the Salzburg Festival. With her second opera, Czernowin was asked to respond to Mozart's Zaïde by creating a counterpoint piece. Adama, which is intertwined with Zaïde, deals with the impact that a political situation has on the individual and the limited freedom one has when trying to escape this impact.

Infinite now was commissioned by Vlaamse opera Antwerp and Ghent, Belgium, Mannheim Stadttheater, Germany, and IRCAM Paris. It was directed by Luk Perceval, staged by Phillip Bussmann, and conducted by Titus Engel. IRCAM and Carlo Laurenzi were in collaboration with Czernowin for the electronics. The opera uses two texts, Homecoming by Chinese writer Can Xue, and Front by Luk Perceval (a play based on Erich Maria Remarque’s All is Quiet on the Western Front, as well as the letters of soldiers from the first world war). A two-and-a-half hour, 6 act work, Infinite Now moves beyond the topics of Homecoming and Front and into the greater sphere of existence here and now. The nature and destiny of survival, as well as the vitality involved in it, are overarching themes of the opera.

1990s

Similarly to the political rebelliousness of the operas, Czernowin’s chamber music enacts an impatience with known and accepted assumptions. Her early chamber pieces from the 1990s explore the possibilities of temporal and formal divergence. In both Afatsim (1996) and String Quartet (1995), a game is made of changing the identity of the instruments by creating “meta instruments” - combining a few instruments into one identity and then separating them. By doing so the ensemble is able to change its identity within the piece. The unfolding of the piece is further fractured by cutting and displacing parts of the continuity into a forest of chaotic utterances. The Wintersongs series uses the same septet material reinterpreted five times, becoming an entirely different musical experience with each iteration.

2000s

Maim (2001–07), for a large orchestra and a group of soloists, and other works from the 2000s including the electronic works of the experimental studio, speculate about the physicality and motion of material. They touch on a strange and unfamiliar kind of “physics”, which toys with our expectations.

2010s

The exploration of time and form on the one hand, and of material, its nature and physicality on the other, find a new expression in HIDDEN (2013–14) for string quartet and electronics, where a slowed down experience of time is coupled with distorted reflections of material, showing a glimpse into a world of unfamiliarity.

Critical acclaim

Czernowin has received numerous awards for her compositions, including the Kranichsteiner Musikpreis (1992), Asahi Shimbun Fellowship Prize (1993), the Schloß Solitude Fellowship (1996), the IRCAM Reading Panel (1998), the Composer’s Prize by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2003), the Rockefeller Foundation Prize (2004), the Fromm Foundation Award (2008), a nomination of the Berlin Wissenschaftskolleg (2008), the Guggenheim Fellowship Award (2011) and the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis (2016). She was Artist in Residence with the Salzburg Festival in 2005/06 and with the Lucerne Festival, Switzerland in 2013.

Opera

Orchestra

Chamber Orchestra

String Orchestra

Solo Instruments with Orchestra or Ensemble

Keyboard Instruments

Chamber Music

Vocal Music