York Höller wins 2010 Grawemeyer Award for Sphären

German composer York Höller has won the 2010 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition for Sphären, a major orchestral score composed between 2001 and 2006.

The Grawemeyer Award, worth $200,000, is awarded annually by the University of Louisville for a work that makes an outstanding contribution to the field of musical composition. The prize announcement describes Höller’s Sphären as “magnificently scored, using a large orchestra to generate colours ranging from the most delicate to the most overwhelming. [It] grips you viscerally from the first bars and never lets up.It is the first time a German composer receives the Grawemeyer Award for music composition.
Sphären, chosen for the award from 136 entries worldwide, was commissioned by West German Radio and premiered in 2008 by the WDR Symphony Orchestra in Cologne. The six-movement, 40-minute piece was inspired by literature, music of the past and the elements of air, water, earth and fire from Greek philosophy. Höller composed the work over a period of five years, dedicating the last movement “with love and gratitude” to his wife, Ursula, who died in 2006. Sphären is scheduled to be commercially released on CD in April 2010 by NEOS in Germany.

York Höller, who signed with Boosey & Hawkes in 1983, is professor emeritus of music composition at the Cologne University of Music. He is renowned for pioneering work at fusing together live and electronic sounds and for his imaginative instrumentation, qualities which have attracted leading interpreters including Pierre Boulez and Daniel Barenboim. His compositions often incorporate references to romanticism and French-influenced orchestration along with modernist techniques, and range from chamber works to The Master and Margarita, his opera based on the novel by Bulgakov, premiered at the Paris Opéra in 1989.