Chaya Czernowin

Born in 1957 in Haifa, Israel. “One of the most important living composers. Her oeuvre is diverse and large, her musical language radical and original. Her four operas are like shock waves for the genre. With her compositions, she makes existential themes a tangible experience for the audience. Like no other, she manages to constantly evolve, to search for new things and at the same time to keep a common thread running through all her works.” (GEMA Deutscher Musikautor*innenpreis, the Jury about Chaya Czernowin, 24/03/2022)

From the 1990s, Chaya Czernowin has written four operas, and a myriad of orchestral and chamber works, with and without electronics. Her works have been performed worldwide. She was the composer in residence in Salzburg Festival in 2005/06, Lucerne Festival in 2013 and Huddersfield Festival in 2021. She was a professor of composition at the University of California at San Diego, and the first woman to be a composition professor at University for Music and Performing Arts Vienna and at Harvard University, where she is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music since 2009 to the present.

Czernowin works create an evolving sonic experience which is multisensory. This experience accesses hidden foreign and unfamiliar fields of existence. Nothing is taken for granted, and risk serves as an opportunity for unpredictable growth and vitality.

Teaching composition has been an important part of Czernowins work. Her list of students include many of the most active and appreciated younger and mid-career composers. She created with Jean Baptist Joly and with her husband, composer Steven Kazuo Takasugi, the Schloss Solitude Academy for Composers (2003–18).

Czernowin’s work was awarded the Composer Prize of Siemens Foundation, GEMA Musikautor:innen Preis; Guggenheim fellowship, Rockefeller, Fromm and Kranichstein Music Prize at Darmstadt Summer Course, among many others. Both operas “Pnima” (2000) and “Infinite Now” (2017) were chosen as the best premieres of the year in the international critic’s survey of Opernwelt. Her CD “the quiet” won the German Record Critics’ Prize. Her work is published by Schott Music, and she is a member of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin and the Akademie der Schönen Künste München, and is on the board of the European Musiktheater Akademie.

Chaya Czernowin received the Kranichstein Music Prize in 1992. She has been a regular tutor in composition at the Darmstadt Summer Course since 2004.