Dr. Alex Nowitz is a German composer and vocal performance artist as well as improviser, sound artist, electronic musician and artist-researcher. His compositional works encompass a good number of chamber music, vocal music, electroacoustic music, two orchestral miniatures, multidisciplinary concert performances, two full-length operas as well as music for dance and spoken theatre.

The range of his voice covers the countertenor, whistling, speaking and a variety of experimental voice types. He works with numerous musicians, singers and composers from a wide range of stylistic areas, more recently in September 2019 with the jazz pianist Michael Wollny at the Alte Oper Frankfurt. Expanding the field of vocal performance art, he applies custom, gesture-controlled live electronics, such as the ‘strophonion’ developed at STEIM in Amsterdam.

He has performed at internationally renowned festivals, e.g. in January 2019 at the opening festival 100 Years of Bauhaus at the Academy of Arts Berlin or, in November 2019, at the Audio Arts Festival in Krakow. In February 2019 he also successfully defended his doctoral thesis Monsters I Love: On multivocal arts at the Stockholm University of the Arts, in which he explored the possibilities of expanding the performance voice.

In the framework of his fellowship, Nowitz intends to compose a work entitled Chronotopes, a schizophony for five voices, eight instrumentalists and live electronics. The work aims to combine vocal performance art, instrumental music and choreography. Choreographic elements written into the score form an inherent part of the composition, in which the correlations between time-related (Greek: 'chronos') and spatial performances (Greek: 'topos') are investigated.

In our showcase
'Multivocal Voice and Sound Dance'. A conversation between Alex Nowitz and Matthias Osterwold (in German)
'über die kulturlose zeit'. An essay by Alex Nowitz (in German)
'Der Geist Von Gestern'. A composition by Alex Nowitz