Detlef Heusinger is one of the defining voices of contemporary music. As a composer, conductor, and long-time director of the SWR Experimental Studio, he has played a key role in advancing the combination of acoustic instruments and live electronics. His music transcends boundaries—between sound and image, structure and emotion, thought and feeling. The new NEOS release brings together three central works that exemplify Heusinger's interdisciplinary approach.
“Abzweige” (2013/14) is a “musical walk through an enchanted forest” – but this forest is not a romantic refuge, rather a place of ambivalence. Electronic textures, shimmering sound fields, and alienated ensemble colors open up a world in which beauty and menace, closeness and distance merge into one another. Live electronics fuse the instrumental sounds into a breathing organism of light, space, and resonance.
With “Ode – Im Lauf der Zeit” (2021/22), Heusinger created a spectacular work for the Schlosslichtspiele Karlsruhe: an audiovisual journey through the history of ideas and sound in Europe. Twelve synthesizers, a children's choir, and recorded material unfold a multicolored panorama from antiquity to the digital present. Beethoven, Schiller, and European ideals flash by – reimagined as vibrant electronic energy between harpsichord resonances, vocoder voices, and techno beats. A tribute to the “Europe of diversity” translated into sound.
Finally, the monumental “Sintflut” (2000/01) is a key work of early multimedia composition. Conceived for three orchestral groups, electronics, and video, an apocalyptic sound architecture unfolds, connecting mythical, religious, and historical levels. Heusinger composes catastrophe as a poetic metaphor—music between vision and warning, between natural force and spiritual renewal.
Heusinger's musical language is characterized by curiosity, precision, and boundary-crossing. His music thinks in spaces, narrates in layers, and breathes with the images. The album reveals an artist who understands sound as movement—as a living field between imagination and insight.
Biographies
Detlef Heusinger, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1956, studied composition, conducting, musicology, German language and literature, and philosophy, as well as guitar, lute, and piano at the conservatories in Bremen, Cologne, and Freiburg, and at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His teachers included Hans Werner Henze, Luigi Nono, Klaus Huber (composition), Francis Travis (conducting), and Hubert Käppel (guitar).
He has received numerous awards for his compositional work, including music prizes from the cities of Bremen and Stuttgart, and scholarships from Villa Massimo (Rome), Cité des Arts (Paris), Künstlerhaus Worpswede, the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of SWF (Freiburg), and the Baldreit Scholarship (Baden-Baden).
He taught at the University of Music in Bremen from 1990 to 1996. He has been a guest lecturer at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Harvard University, Goldsmith University, and the Université de Montreal.
Since 1991, he has also worked as a director and, at times, as director of the Rossini Festival on Rügen, staging operas by Handel, Heusinger, Rossini, Donizetti, Saint-Saëns, Offenbach, and Britten in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, and Switzerland. As producer and film director of Pandora I & II, he created his first video opera for Radio Bremen in 1993, followed by Sintflut for the Donaueschingen Music Days (SWR) in 2001. From 2022 to 2024, Ode – Im Lauf der Zeit followed at the Schlosslichtspiele Karlsruhe.
From 2006 to 2022, he was artistic director of the SWR Experimental Studio, where he founded the matrix academy and, together with Peter Weibel, initiated and was responsible for the Giga Hertz Prize. As a conductor, he has been responsible for a large number of (world) premieres, most recently at the Freiburg Theater, including operas by Ying Wang and Huihui Cheng. Since 2009, Heusinger has been the director of the Ensemble Experimental, which he founded and with which he has realized more than 200 performances in Europe, North America, and South America. In 2011, the ensemble was awarded the German Record Critics' Prize for the first recording of Luigi Nono's Risonanze erranti for the NEOS label.
His compositional work focuses on the music theater works Der Turm (1989, Theater Bremen/RB), Babylon (1997, Schwetzinger Festspiele, Nationaltheater Mannheim/SWR), Lulu (Alban Berg – Act 3, 2019, Theater Bremen), Jukeboxopera (2021, Theater Freiburg/SWR), and dance theater pieces such as Materialermüdung (1989, Stuttgart Ballet) and Volx Muzak (1993, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Reinhild-Hoffmann-Compagnie). This was followed in 2022 by the family opera Zeitreisemaschine at the Bregenz Festival and in 2024 by his oratorio Foundlinghouse at the Handel Festival in Karlsruhe.
As a composer and conductor, he has been engaged at such diverse festivals as Ars Electronica (Austria), Berliner Festwochen, Borealis Festival (Norway), Darmstadt Summer Courses, Donaueschingen Music Days, Klang Festival Copenhagen, musica nova Helsinki, Roma Europa Festival (Italy), SALT Festival Canada, and Warsaw Autumn. He has performed as a soloist on electric guitar with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, among others. Performers of his compositions include the Arditti Quartet, the Auryn Quartet, the Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Recherche, the Ensemble Resonanz, the Ensemble Dal Niente, the Israel Contemporary Players, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the DSO Berlin, and the SWR Symphony Orchestra.
www.detlef-heusinger.de
Founded in 2011 in connection with the SWR Experimental Studio's matrix academy, ENSEMBLE EXPERIMENTAL sees itself as a soloist ensemble for music with (live) electronics. Through study and intensive rehearsals, the international ensemble aims to do justice to the special conditions of this genre and thus realize exemplary concerts and recordings. Some of its members have been associated with the SWR Experimentalstudio as soloists for many years and often participate in the creation of works in the studio, such as Roberto Fabbriciani with Luigi Nono. In addition to regular performances at SWR, it has made guest appearances at festivals and concert series such as ACHT BRÜCKEN | Musik für Köln, the Atlas Festival in Amsterdam, the Borealis Festival in Bergen (Norway), the Cankarjev dom concert series in Ljubljana, the Lucerne Festival, the Klang Festival Copenhagen, and the Warsaw Autumn. World premieres of works by Dániel Péter Biró, Chaya Czernowin, Marko Nikodijević, Anthony Tan, and Vito Žuraj testify to the ensemble's popularity, especially among the younger generation of composers. The ensemble has released its own CD series on the NEOS label. Its recording of Luigi Nono's Risonanze erranti was awarded the German Record Critics' Prize (NEOS 11119). Detlef Heusinger is the artistic director and principal conductor.
www.ensembleexperimental.de
Cantus Juvenum Karlsruhe e.V. is the joint singing school of the Protestant City Church and the Protestant Christ Church for boys and girls and was founded in 2006. Based on criteria such as voice development, age, or musical experience, the girls and boys are divided into preliminary choir, advanced choir, junior choir, or concert choir. In addition to weekly choir rehearsals, all singers receive regular individual support in the form of voice training in one-on-one or pair lessons. The artistic director of the girls' choirs is cantor Peter Gortner, while Tristan Meister and church music director cantor Christian-Markus Raiser are responsible for the boys' choirs and male voices. The chairman of the association is Claus Temps. The honorary chairman is Prof. Hanno Müller-Brachmann.
www.swr.de
Cantus Juvenum Karlsruhe e.V. ist die gemeinsame Singschule der Ev. Stadtkirche und der Ev. Christuskirche für Jungen und Mädchen und wurde 2006 gegründet. Nach Kriterien wie Stimmentwicklung, Alter oder musikalischer Erfahrung werden die Mädchen und Knaben in Vorchor, Aufbauchor, Nachwuchschor oder Konzertchor eingeteilt. Neben den wöchentlichen Chorproben erhalten alle Sänger:innen regelmäßig individuelle Förderung in Form von Stimmbildung im Einzel- oder Zweierunterricht. Die künstlerische Leitung der Mädchenchöre liegt bei Kantor Peter Gortner, die der Knabenchöre und Männerstimmen bei Tristan Meister und Kirchenmusikdirektor Kantor Christian-Markus Raiser. Vorsitzender des Vereines ist Claus Temps. Ehrenvorsitzender Prof. Hanno Müller-Brachmann.
With international concerts, musical church services, opera performances, and joint projects with the Berlin Philharmonic, the SWR Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic, and as a cooperation partner of the Badisches Staatstheater with the Badische Staatskapelle, Cantus Juvenum can look back on many successful years. Numerous awards, including individual prizes in the “Jugend musiziert” competition at state and federal level and the Papageno Award 2012 (Linz) International Youth Theater Prize, underscore the success of the singing school, in which around 200 boys and girls from kindergarten to young adulthood are currently involved.
www.cantus-juvenum.de
The SWR Experimentalstudio sees itself as an interface between compositional ideas and technical implementation. Every year, several composers are invited to take up a working scholarship, enabling them to realize their works in dialogue with the studio's staff. In addition to producing these works, the studio is also active as a performing ensemble. With 50 years of presence in the international music scene, it has established itself as the leading ensemble for works with live electronics and performs regularly at almost all major festivals (Berliner Festwochen, Wiener Festwochen, Salzburger Festspiele, Festival d'Automne à Paris, Biennale di Venezia, etc.) as well as in numerous renowned music theaters (including Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Carnegie Hall in New York, Théâtre de la Monnaie, Teatro Real in Madrid).
The outstanding productions in the history of the SWR Experimentalstudio include works by such important composers as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono, the latter of whom created almost his entire late work in close collaboration with the studio. Since its premiere in 1984, Nono's “audio tragedy” Prometeo has been performed more than 90 times by the SWR Experimentalstudio and can be described as a milestone in 20th-century music history. Among the younger generation, Mark Andre, Chaya Czernowin, and Georg Friedrich Haas in particular have made a name for themselves as composers who have produced pioneering works at the SWR Experimentalstudio. Among the performers associated with the studio are outstanding musical personalities such as Mauricio Pollini, Claudio Abbado, Peter Eötvös, Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer, Carolin and Jörg Widmann, Irvine Arditti, and Roberto Fabbriciani.
The SWR Experimentalstudio has received several international awards for its exemplary work, including the German Record Critics' Annual Award for its production of works by Luigi Nono. Following Hans Peter Haller, André Richard, and Detlef Heusinger, Joachim Haas has been the director of the SWR Experimentalstudio since 2022.
www.swr.de
Johannes Kalitzke was born in Cologne in 1959. He studied church music there from 1974 to 1976. After graduating from high school, he studied piano with Aloys Kontarsky, conducting with Wolfgang von der Nahmer, and composition with York Höller at the Cologne University of Music. A scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation enabled him to study at IRCAM in Paris. There he was also a student of Vinko Globokar.
Johannes Kalitzke's first engagement as a conductor took him to the Gelsenkirchen Musiktheater im Revier in 1984, where he was principal conductor from 1988 to 1990. In 1991, he became artistic director and conductor of the Ensemble Musikfabrik. He regularly guest conducts internationally with ensembles (Klangforum Wien, Collegium Novum, Ensemble Modern) and numerous symphony orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Munich Philharmonic. He has conducted opera productions at the Berlin State Opera Unter den Linden and the Salzburg Festival, among others. As a composer, he has received commissions for the Donaueschingen Music Days, Ultraschall Berlin, ECLAT, and the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, among others.
Since 2015, Johannes Kalitzke has held a professorship in conducting at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg. He teaches as a guest lecturer at various European universities, including the Reina Sofia School of Music in Madrid. Kalitzke has received numerous awards, including the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Scholarship from the City of Cologne and the scholarship for the Villa Massimo in Rome. He has been a member of the Academy of Arts since 2009 and a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts since 2015.
www.johanneskalitzke.com
