composer

geb. 1969
geb. 1969
Dániel Péter Biró (born 1969) is Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the University of Victoria. He began his studies at the Bartók Conservatory in Hungary studying with composition with Miklos Kocsár and theory with Iván Madarász. He studied guitar in Switzerland with Stefan Schmidt at the Bern Musikhochschule and in Germany with Jürgen Ruck at the Würzburg Musikhochschule. He studied composition with Hans Zender and score reading and chamber music with Bernhard Kontarsky at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule. In 1995-1996 he studied with Michael Jarrell at the Universität für Musik in Vienna. He completed his PhD in composition at Princeton University in 2004. His dissertation was a comparative study of early notational practices in examples of Jewish Torah trope, tenth century plainchant from St. Gallen and Hungarian laments. There his dissertation advisors were Kofi Agawu, Scott Burnham and Paul Lansky. In Princeton he studied plainchant with Peter Jeffery and attended lectures on Jewish merkebah mysticism of Peter Schäfer and Talmud with James Diamond.

Dr. Biró has researched Hungarian folk music at the Academy of Science in Budapest and Jewish and Islamic chant in Israel and the Netherlands. Awarded the Hungarian Government's Kodály Award for Hungarian composers, his compositions have been commissioned by the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the City of Darmstadt, the Stuttgart Opera, Sudwestfunk, Vancouver New Music, the ISCM, the Imatronic Festival and have been performed around the world. In 2003 he was invited to the Academy Schloss Solitude where he studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi and his composition Mishpatim (Laws) was performed by the Ensemble Surplus, In 2006 he was a featured composer and lecturer at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music and in 2008 at the International Messiaen Music Week. In 2010 he was awarded the Gigahertz Production Prize for Electronic Music by the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. In the fall of 2011 he was Visiting Professor at Utrecht University in Utrecht, Netherlands, studying Dutch Jewish and Islamic chant traditions. From 2010–2013 he has been a faculty member at the Matrix Academy for Electronic Music of the Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, Germany, at the Tedarim Academy in Israel, the First International Symposium of New Music and Computer Music in Curitiba, Brazil and the 2013 International Masterclass for Composers at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. His composition Kivrot Hata’avah (Graves of Craving) will be representing Canada in the World Music Days in Vienna, Austria. Dániel Péter Biró is co-editor (with Harald Krebs) of The String Quartets of Béla Bartók: Tradition and Legacy in Analytical Perspective (Oxford University Press) and (with Franklin Cox, Alexander Sigman and Steven Kazuo Takasugi) Search – Journal for New Music and Culture (Online Music Journal). He is co-founder of the Ensemble Tsilumos and initiator of the SALT New Music Festival and Symposium in Victoria, BC.

In 2014 he completed a commissioned composition for the Neue Vocalsolisten, as a participant in the Mediterranean Voices Project, premiered at the Eclat Festival in Stuttgart, Germany. In 2015 completed a new piece for the Schola Heidelberg and ensemble aisthesis, premiered at the University of Heidelberg, Germany in October 2015. He is currently working on commissions from pianist Ermis Theodorakis, funded with a composer commissioning grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and for the Klangforum Heidelberg.Prof. Biró was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University in 2014-2015 where he worked on the completion of the composition cycle Mishpatim (Laws). The recording of the cycle, performed by Noa Frenkel, the Ensemble Surplus and the Experimentalstudio, will be released by Neos Music in 2016. In 2015 he was elected to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada. Dániel Péter Biró is co-editor (with Harald Krebs) of The String Quartets of Béla Bartók: Tradition and Legacy in Analytical Perspective (Oxford University Press). In 2016-2017 he is Artist-in Residence at the University of Victoria Centre for Studies in Religion and Society. He is a founding member of the new music ensemble Tsilumos, co-organizer of the Salt New Music Festival and Symposium and is co-editor of Search – Journal for New Music and Culture.

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