HOW DO YOU WORK? Conversations, drawings and responses (Vienna) by Adelheid Mers

Preliminarily in 2012, and formally in 2013/14 , I asked experimental musicians and composers in Vienna "How do you work?". Based on those conversations, I created two drawings of what I call each artist's "epistemic engine", or the way I understood them to work. One drawing was a free form exploration, and the other mapped my notes onto the "Fractal 3-line Matrix", a diagrammatic instrument that emerged in my work in 2011, after the informal round of conversations. On sharing the drawings with them, artists were invited to produce a response in a medium of their choice. This project was supported by the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna.

Karlheinz Essl (b. 1960) is an Austrian composer, performer, improviser, media artist and composition teacher.

He studied composition in Vienna with Friedrich Cerha and completed his studies in musicology with a doctoral thesis on Anton Webern. As a double bassist, he played in chamber ensembles and experimental jazz bands.

Essl was composer-in-residence at the Darmstadt Summer School (1990- 94) and at IRCAM in Paris (1991-93). Between 1995-2006 he taught Algorithmic Composition at the Bruckner University in Linz. Since 2007, he has been professor of composition and electro-acoustic music at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

His work with computers and a long-term preoccupation with the poetics of serial music have been formative influences on his compositional thinking. During the 1990s he carried out various projects for the internet and became increasingly involved with improvisation. In 1997, Karlheinz Essl was a featured composer at the Salzburg Festival. His compositions are now played all over the world.

Besides writing instrumental music, Karlheinz Essl also works in the areas of electronic music, interactive real-time compositions and sound installations. He develops software environments for algorithmic composition and live electronics. As a performer and improviser, he plays his own computer-based real-time composition environment m@ze°2 and also instruments such as electric guitar, toy piano and music box.

http://www.essl.at/

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