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.
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 accalimed 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 adress the specific challenges of cross-cultural artforms.
Huyssen received bursaries from the Steinbrenner-Foundation, Berlin, the Bavarian Ministry of Culture, a SAMRO Special Merit Award as well as a grant from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation.
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 independantly conceived and staged Baroque opera productions throughout Germany and Austria.
His compositions have been performed by numerous major European and South African orchstras 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 2007 he is a senior lecturer at the Music Department of the University of the Freestate in Bloemfontein. Though now permanently based in South Africa he still frequently works in Europe.
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.