HANAU
Young composer Marlene Jacobs wins an endowed composition commission
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The 32nd “Orchestra Workshop for Young Composers” ended on Thursday with a final concert broadcast on YouTube in the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater. The format, which is unique in Germany, took place partially virtually during pandemic times. A total of 5 young talents were awarded a prize, including 22-year-old Marlene Jacobs from Hanau.
The Harz Symphony Orchestra played a total of 7 world premieres by young musicians who had been fine-tuning their pieces during the 32nd “Orchestra Workshop of Young Composers” in front of empty seats and yet an uncountable audience. In order to enable the nationwide unique format even in pandemic times, the initiators relied on virtual exchange this year: The participants from their hometowns connected to the seminars with the composer Annette Schlünz from the Conservatoire Strasbourg and Professor Martin Christoph Redel from the Detmold University of Music . In Halberstadt the pieces were rehearsed and made ready for performance under the direction of workshop manager MD Johannes Rieger by the Harzer Sinfoniker, the orchestra of the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater – here, too, the participants were connected via the Internet.
Marlene Jacobs qualified for participation with her work “The Fear of Infinity”. This composition was found by the Kuratorium Stadtkultur Halberstadt e. V. is so appealing that it commissioned the young artist to compose a composition for the Harz Symphony Orchestra for May 2022. This order is endowed with € 1,000.
Marlene was born in 1998 in Münster / Westphalia, but grew up in Hanau, where she graduated from high school in 2016. She has been playing the piano, mostly classical, since she was six. She took part in several piano competitions, including “Jugend musiziert”, the Büdinger piano competition and the Willy-Bissing competition. She later took jazz piano lessons. At the same time she began to compose. She was supported by her jazz piano teacher in these, mainly piano compositions. Marlene started playing the violin at the age of eight. During her school days she was a member of the symphony orchestra of the Karl Rehbein School in Hanau, where she played first violin and, if the pieces allowed, also piano. Since the age of 14 she took singing lessons, also with a focus on jazz. From 2016 to 2020 Marlene studied “Sound and Music Production” at the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences, graduating with a bachelor’s degree. During her studies she produced, among other things, orchestral mixes, radio features and film and video game scoring. For her thesis she set a complete short film to music, created the sound design, composed the music and recorded it. Because the focus of this course was more on sound engineering and sound design, she missed the purely musical side. That is why she began taking composition lessons with Claus Kühnl at the Dr. To take Hoch’s Conservatory in Frankfurt, since 2019 also as a bachelor’s degree. Here she composed works for horn solo, saxophone and various compositions for piano, which were performed.
The “Orchestra Workshop for Young Composers” is the only composition competition in Germany aimed at children and young people up to the age of 27 in the field of orchestral music. It is supported by the Landesmusikrat Sachsen-Anhalt e. V. in cooperation with the Nordharzer Städtebundtheater and the city of Halberstadt and organized by the state of Saxony-Anhalt, the German Orchestra Foundation (DOS), the United Volksbank and the Kuratorium Stadtkultur Halberstadt e. V. funded.
The final concert is available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNq2URxZYvN9iDCmUnBr0Lg (pm) +++
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