Michael Obst (composer)

Michael Obst (born 30 November 1955) is a German composer and pianist.

Obst was born in Frankfurt am Main. He studied music education from 1973 to 1978 in Mainz, and from 1977 to 1982 studied piano with Alfons Kontarsky and Aloys Kontarsky at the Hochschule für Musik Köln, where he sat his piano examination in 1982. At the same time, between 1979 and 1986, he studied composition with Hans Ulrich Humpert in the Studio for Elektronic Music of the Hochschule für Musik Köln. From 1981 to 1986 he was the pianist and a founding member of the Ensemble Modern, from 1986 to 1989 he worked as an interpreter with , playing synthesizer in Stockhausen’s operatic cycle Licht (Visscher 2001).

He was invited to the Studios of Gent (IPEM), Stockholm (EMS), Bourges (Groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges), Paris (IRCAM), and Freiburg (SWF-Heinrich Strobel Stiftung) as well as to the Studio for Electronic Music of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk in Cologne. At IRCAM he realized the electronics for his chamber opera Solaris (to a libretto by Stanisław Lem); the opera received its première at the Munich Biennale in 1996. Since 1997 he has been Professor of Composition at the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt in Weimar (Visscher 2001).

Since 2010 he has been Professor for Composition at the University of Music and performing Arts in Vienna.

In works such as Solaris, Obst adopts a modernist sensibility while at the same time questioning its underlying philosophy (Meph 1997, 44).

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