For the second time this season, the Barenboim-Said Akademie presents its Composers’ Club. In this series of seminars and conversations, some of today’s leading composers are invited to present their work. Each installment consists of a preparatory seminar for Akademie students, which is focused on a closer look at scores and aspects of the music, and a live talk with the composer that is open to the public.

On February 6, Stephan Winkler, Professor of Composition and Theory, welcomes German composer Gordon Kampe, whose song cycle O Seufzen, Heulen, Herzensknall had its world premiere in a revised version at Berlin’s Ultraschall festival on January 20, 2024. The composer will introduce this new piece as well as his opera Dogville, based on the Lars von Trier film, which premiered last year in Essen.

Born in Herne in 1976, Gordon Kampe trained as an electrician before taking up his composition studies with Hans-Joachim Hespos, Adriana Hölszky, and Nicolaus A. Huber. He also studied musicology and history. His honors include the Composition Prize of the City of Stuttgart (2007 and 2011), the Composition Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation (2016), the Schneider Schott Music Prize of the City of Mainz (2016), and the Rome Prize of the Villa Massimo (2017-8). He has received scholarships from Berlin’s Academy of Arts, Cité internationale des arts in Paris, and Freiburg’s SWR Experimentalstudio. In 2008, he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on 20th-century fairy-tale operas. From 2012 to 2017, Gordon Kampe was a member of the Junge Akademie of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities/German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He has held a professorship in composition at Hamburg’s Hochschule für Musik und Theater since 2017, is a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg, and since 2021 has been president of the Society for Contemporary Music.