The winners of the Giga-Hertz Award

The Giga-Hertz Award (given by the ZKM | Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe and the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO des SWR Freiburg) addresses composers working in the areas of electronic and acousmatic music. A Grand Prize and four Special Prizes are awarded once a year by an international jury.
The Grand Prize honors the artistic and life’s work of renowned composers of electronic and acousmatic music.
This year the Grand Price of € 15.000 goes to the british composer Trevor Wishart. The four Special Prices, each worth € 8.000 go to Natasha Barrett (born in Britain), Dai Fujikura (born in Japan), the Portuguese João Pedro Paiva de Oliveira and to Åke Parmerud from Sweden.

Members of the jury 2008 are Ludger Brümmer, Detlef Heusinger, François Bayle, pioneer of electroacoustic and acousmatic music who developed the famous Acousmonium, Jonathan Harvey, Armin Köhler and Peter Weibel.
They said: "Particularly with his developments in the area of the software synthesis, he made complex sound processing understandable and applicable. Trevor Wishart designed in 1986, together with other composers, the Composers Desktop Project for Atari and Unix computers. Is to be emphasized also his work in the musical education and the formulation of its aesthetic and technical approaches in educationally oriented writings such as 'Audible design' and 'On Sonic Art'. [...] His music is enormously effective and has influenced generations of composers. "

The award ceremony will be held at the ZKM | Karlsruhe on November 29th, 2008 (starting at 7.00pm), in line with two Award-Winner-Concerts on November 28th and November 29th (8.30pm).

[via giga-hertz.de]