Oliver Korte


Oliver Korte is a German composer, music theorician, musicologist and College professor.

Life

Born in Hamburg, Korte studied musical composition, music theory and musicology in Hamburg, Vienna and Berlin. Important impulses were also given to him by private composition studies with Gösta Neuwirth. His compositions have been awarded several composition prizes and scholarships. In 2002 he received his doctorate at the Technical University of Berlin with a thesis on the Ecclesiastical Action of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. After teaching positions at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" and at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Rostock as well as a position as research assistant at the Universität der Künste Berlin he was appointed professor for music theory and ear training at the Musikhochschule Lübeck in autumn 2006. He is co-founder of the Society for Music Theory and editor of the Schriften der Musikhochschule Lübeck. In the winter semester 2017/18 he also taught as a visiting professor at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz.
Kortes main work to date is the opera Copernicus for singer, narrator, orchestra and electronics, premiered in 2015 at the Festspielhaus Hellerau in Dresden. The composer calls the work an "opera spaziale". This is due to the fact that a spatial concept is derived directly from the subject: strings, wind instruments and percussion, as well as loudspeakers and video projections are positioned in "Copernican rings" around the audience. The wind instruments, comparable to a planetarium, move into ever new acoustic constellations. Korte has assembled the libretto from various thespian original texts of the Renaissance as well as from some sound recordings of the 20th century. The work was received by critics as "multilingual, philosophical world theatre.

Work