Chaya Czernowin

In her works, Israeli composer Chaya Czernowin creates a multisensory sound experience that is both analytical and inventive, blending tactile and visual elements with sound. In this speculative realm, each piece aims to explore uncharted fields of existence: nothing is taken for granted, and risk becomes an opportunity for unpredictable growth and vitality. Characteristic of her work are the use of metaphor as a means of reaching a sound world that is unfamiliar, the work with noise and physical parameters such as weight or textural surface (as in smoothness or roughness) as well as the inquiry and problematisation of the nature of musical energy, time and unfolding. Czernowin’s operas, orchestral and chamber music, both with and without electronics, have been performed worldwide. Her most important works include the orchestral piece “Maim”, “Hidden” for quartet and electronics, the cycle “The Wintersongs I-V”, and the operas “Pnima”, “Infinite Now” and “Heart Chamber”; more recent pieces include “The Fabrication of Light”, “Atara”, “Immaterial” and “Seltene Erde”.

Czernowin received her artistic training at the Rubin Academy in Tel Aviv, studied with Dieter Schnebel in Berlin and with Brian Ferneyhough at the University of California. After holding scholarships in Tokyo, she taught at IRCAM in Paris and at the Yoshiro Irino Institute in Tokyo. From 2005 to 2006, she served as Composer in Residence at the Salzburg Festival, in 2013 at the Lucerne Festival and in 2021 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Czernowin was a professor of composition at the University of California, San Diego, and at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Since 2009, she has been the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University.

Czernowin’s work has been honored with numerous awards, including the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize, GEMA German Music Authors’ Prize, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Prize and the Kranichstein Music Prize from the Darmstadt Summer Course, among others. “Pnima” (2000) and “Infinite Now” (2017) were recognized as the best world premieres of the year in an international critics’ survey conducted by Opernwelt magazine. Her CD “the quiet” received the German Record Critics’ Award. Czernowin is a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste, and she serves on the board of the European Academy for Music Theatre.