11 compositions awarded
The jury of the VII Competition for Electronic Music of the Forum Wallis has awarded prizes to 11 of the 234 works submitted and honored another 10 with a Special Mention.
The international competition for new acousmatic music Ars Electronica Forum Valais will be held for the 7th time in 2021. The festival and the jury have now announced the results: Eleven works by composers from Switzerland, Greece, France, Great Britain, Israel, Argentina, Colombia and the USA (in alphabetical order) made it into the ranks of the Ars Electronica Forum Wallis Selection 2021: Manuella Blackburn/Microplastics, Lee Gilboa/Redacted, Bernadette Johnson/Summer Fragments, Panayiotis Kokoras/AI Phantasy, Thibault Madeline/Enfant Sauvage, Thibault Madeline/Le murmure de Bombus, Nicolás Medero Larrosa/nightblooming-genera, David Nguyen/Whale Song Stranding, Richard Scott/Thunder actually bycicles, Sylvain Souklaye/Soliloquy in motion, Juan Carlos Vasquez/Channel Zero.
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- Image: Forum Wallis
- From left to right: Manuella Blackburn, Bernadette Johnson, Lee Gilboa, Sylvain Souklaye, Richard Scott, Nicolás Medero Larrosa, Juan Carlos Vasquez, David Nguyen, Panayiotis Kokoras.
Special Mention and Jury
There was a Special Mention for ten other works (in alphabetical order): Renzo Filinich Orozco (PER)/Convergent PointsElliot Hernandez (MEX)/RitualLisa-Maria Hollaus (AUT)/Brood, Helge Meyer (GER)/Noise Music, Paul Oehlers (USA)/Flux hammerChristopher Poovey(USA)/Forged Effervescence, Leah Reid (USA)/Reverie, Richard Scott (GBR)/Music floats upwards, Ryne Siesky (USA)/Wanton Hush, Pierre-Henri Wicomb (ZFA)/Evenly hovering.
The jury consisted of Kotoka Suzuki (Tokyo/Toronto), Reuben de Lautour (Christchurch), Jaime Oliver (Lima/New York) and Javier Hagen (Director Forum Wallis). The selected works will be performed on August 10 by the Swiss-Italian composer and sound engineer Simone Conforti (Biennale Musica Venezia, IRCAM Paris) as part of the Forum Wallis New Music Festival at Leuk Castle.
A total of 234 works from all continents were submitted. The large number of works that dealt with the immediate and far-reaching consequences of the corona pandemic was remarkable, as was the outstanding quality and thus also the numerical presence of Latin American composers, who made up a quarter of the 21 selected works.
Forum Valais
The Forum Valais is an international festival for new music that was founded in 2006 and is usually organized by the Valais section of the International Society for New Music IGNM-VS over the long Whitsun weekend. This year, the 15th edition of the festival will take place at Leuk Castle from August 10 to 12 due to the coronavirus pandemic. Guest ensembles and soloists include Ensemble Modern, Lukas Ligeti, UMS 'n JIP, Hanspeter Pfammatter, Manuel Mengis, Lukas Huber, Roberto Domeniconi, Urban Mäder, Silke Strahl, Gerry Hemingway and the Hyper Duo.
