Arne Gieshoff

If everything were possible, where would you like to have a concert?

If everything were really possible (and it never is), I would certainly realise how little that calms me down or makes me curious. A place that gives me time to get to know it – with its people, its stories (including those that are often ignored or concealed) and its practicalities. One whose stories do not reveal themselves immediately, but only become audible over time. That would be the right one.

How do you deal with music history?

If music history is a rock garden – practical, cultivated, but dead – it freezes into a ritual without effect: beautiful to look at, but deadly for everything that doesn’t conform to its lines of organisation.

But if it is a compost – fertile, wild, infused with forgotten and buried things that find new life – then I like to work carefully on and with its humus and let it nourish and sustain me.

Concert hall or outside?

Why decide? Preferably both – at the same time. The structured interior proliferates, the open exterior moulds itself. Everything combines in a lively, permeable network. So far, there has been no time to complete this endeavour. Perhaps this is the place from question 1 that I would like to see.

Born in 1988 in Bad Soden, Germany. Arne Gieshoff‘s works have been performed by ensembles such as the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Deutsche Oper Berlin and the Collegium Novum Zürich. His oeuvre ranges from instrumental compositions to site-specific installations that incorporate found sound objects, field recordings, interactive electronics and sounds produced live by singers and musicians. Gieshoff’s work has received numerous awards, including the Royal Philharmonic Society Composition Prize, the Mendelssohn Scholarship, the Hans Werner Henze Foundation Scholarship and the Darmstadt Music Prize. In 2024, he received a scholarship from the Free State of Bavaria for the International House of Artists Villa Concordia in Bamberg. He received his compositional training at the Royal College of Music in London, among others. He has lived in Darmstadt since 2019, where he teaches composition at the Akademie für Tonkunst.

Arne Gieshoff teaches at the Darmstadt Summer Course for the second time in 2025.