Hans Huyssen

Hans Huyssen's musical activities encompass a wide range of fields, including early and contemporary European music as well as traditional African music and music education. His ongoing relationship with early music - as a Baroque cellist he is member of various period instrument ensembles - led him to a very personal approach towards contemporary music. Regarding it as the period music of our time, he strives to reconnect it to its earliest historical and - since his return to South Africa - geographical roots, which are all too often imprudently cast aside.

With his varied engagements as composer, conductor, cellist and educator he adamantly defends his stance that the interpretation of ancient and contemporary music should not be attempted in isolation, but yield exceptionally valid expressions if seen in each other's context: a concert hall should neither be a museum nor a laboratory, but be a contemporary forum for socially and artistically relevant musical expressions.

Pursuing an apposite South African form of contemporary music prompted him to return to this country after having lived in Europe for 14 years following his studies in Salzburg and Munich. Aware of the dangers of superficial cross-cultural mêlées, he has purposefully contextualized African and European musical conventions and criteria in a variety of ways in numerous compositions and performances: Together with Dizu Plaatjies he produced the highly acclaimed CD / CD-R Fynbos Calling, as well as an African adaption of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas for the 2002 Spier Arts Festival. The collaboration with the veteran Pondo singer Madosini resulted in the creation of the The Songs of Madosini for the ICMF 2002. In his first opera, MASQUE (premiered in Cape Town in October 2005) as well as in Ciacona & Tshikona (2007) he assembles large forces from the realms of traditional and contemporary African and European music to yet again address the specific challenges of cross-cultural art forms.

Huyssen received bursaries from the Steinbrenner-Foundation, Berlin, the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation. In 1997 he won a SAMRO Special Merit Award and in 2010 was the recipient of the Helgaard Steyn Award, South Africa's most prestigious composition prize. He holds a NRF research rating for his body of work facilitating intercultural musical dialogues within the culturally heterogeneous South African context.

He was co-founder of the Ensemble Refugium and is the director of così facciamo, a Munich based ensemble for the performance of early and contemporary music on period instruments. In this capacity he has directed a number of independently conceived and staged Baroque opera productions in Germany and Austria, Switzerland and Luxemburg.

His compositions have been performed by numerous major European and South African orchestras and ensembles such as the Mozarteum Orchestra, Münchner Symphoniker, Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Münchener Kammerorchester, Dresdener Kreuzchor, Chamber Orchestra of South Africa, the Johannesburg and Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestras, the SA National Youth Orchestra, Ensemble Noir, Ensemble Uthingo, the Sontonga and Amici Quartets and others.

Since 2006 he has been a senior lecturer at the Music Department of the University of the Freestate in Bloemfontein. He held a yearlong fellowship as artist in residence at STIAS (Stellenbosch) until June 2010 and is currently enrolled for a practical Ph.D. study in composition at the University of Stellenbosch. Though now permanently based in South Africa he still frequently works in Europe.

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