Program and Artist Biography

Michel van der Aa (Netherlands, 1970) is one of Europe’s most sought-after composers today. 

For van der Aa, music is more than organized sound or a structuring of notes. His music has expressive power, combining sounds and scenic images in a play of changing perspectives. Van der Aa’s recent stage works show a successful involvement as a film and stage director as well as composer.

“One of the most distinctive of the younger composers in Europe today. His ability to fuse music, text and visual images into a totally organic whole sets him apart from nearly all his contemporaries.“ (The Guardian)

Van der Aa’s works often include a theatrical element: staging, film and music are seamlessly interwoven. Dramatic personages take on various identities or have an alter ego; musicians on the stage interact with their electronic counterparts on soundtrack or film. The virtual space that emerges works its way into the mind of the audience. Sound, in van der Aa’s book, is malleable: it can constantly assume other forms, sometimes recognizable, sometimes not. Van der Aa is in fact a playwright in music.

His sounds – like real people – can be flexible or stubborn; they either take control or get the short end of the stick; they reinforce or counteract each other, affecting audiences with their expressive power.

Michel van der Aa’s imaginative music theatre works One (2002), After Life (2005/06) and The Book of Disquiet (2008) have received international critical and public acclaim. The innovative aspect of these operas is their use of film images and sampled soundtracks as an essential element of the score. Staging, film and music are seamlessly interwoven into a collage of transparent layers, resulting in a work that is part documentary film, part philosophy.

In 1999 Michel van der Aa was the first Dutch composer to win the prestigious International Gaudeamus Prize. Subsequent awards include the Matthijs Vermeulen prize (2004), a Siemens Composers Grant (2005), the Charlotte Köhler Prize for his directing work and the interdisciplinary character of his oeuvre (2005) and the Paul Hindemith Prize (2006).

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a contemporary classical music ensemble of over thirty chamber musicians, including strings, woodwinds, piano, percussion, voice and composers, which enables great flexibility of programming. ICE performs works scored for ensembles from solos and duos to chamber orchestra, as well as multi-media works, works utilizing extended techniques and non-western instruments, and improvisatory and electro-acoustic works.

With ongoing residencies at New York University, New York, Columbia College, Chicago, and Conservatorio de las Rosas, Morelia, Mexico, the group is considered to be one of the most important and effective proponents of new concert music in the United States. They are unique among U.S.-based new music ensembles for championing and performing music by European, Latin American, and Asian composers rarely performed in the U.S., such as Ignacio Baca Lobera, Dai Fujikura, and Philippe Manoury.