Composers' Workshop: Chaya Cernowin

Chaya Czernowin (Dec 1957)  is a composer of operas, orchestral and chamber works with and without electronics, which have been performed worldwide. She was composer in residence in Salzburg festival 2005/6, and Lucerne Festival 2013. She is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard University and was a Professor for Composition at the University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna Austria and the University of California San Diego. Czernowin works imaginatively and analytically with metaphors as a means of reaching a sound world which is unfamiliar and is never taken for granted attempting to give a voice to what is internally hidden from one’s view. 

Main pieces: the opera Pnima; the orchestral piece Maim (50’); HIDDEN  (45’) for quartet and electronics; the operas Infinite Now (150’); and Heart Chamber (2018/9);  the fabrication of light (2019/20) Atara (2021).

Czernowin’s work was awarded the Composer Prize of  Siemens Foundation, Guggenheim fellowship,  Fromm, and  Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at Darmstadt Ferienkurse,  and many others. Both operas Pnima (in 2000) and Infinite Now (in 2017) were chosen as the best premieres of the  year in the international critics survey of Opernwelt.  Her CD the quiet won the German Record Critics' Prize.  Her work is published by Schott, and she is a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin and the Akademie der Schönen Künste Munich and is on the board of the European Musiktheater Akademie.