updated 2 May 2022
© DR

Claudia Molitor

German-English composer, musician and sound artist born in 1974 in Germany.

Claudia Molitor studied music and media at the University of Sussex. She then obtained a Master of Music at the City University of London, which she complemented in 2004 with a PhD in composition at the University of Southampton, under the supervision of Michael Finnissy.

Her works are regularly performed in Europe, including festivals such as Wien Modern, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, Totally Thames, BBC Proms, Sonica, and Spitalfields Music Festival, as well as gallery events such as Turner Contemporary in Margate, Bold Tendencies, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her sponsors include the London Sinfonietta, the BBC, the Royal Philharmonic Society, and Cryptic.

Molitor’s artistic thinking is based on a dynamic pluralism that draws on the classical music tradition but also extends to contemporary art practices such as video art, installation, sound art, and visual art. In her practice, the score often becomes a means of exploration in which the conventions of notation, the qualification of the sound phenomenon and the historical hierarchies of sound are questioned.

Her multidisciplinary catalog includes pieces for classical instrumentation (Tango, for piano), electroacoustics (Sonorama, a work conceived for the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate, and which creatively employs sound archives from the British Library), and installations (The Singing Bridge, a sound walk for Waterloo Bridge, installed at Somerset House).

Her work Sonorama was awarded the British Composer Award in 2016. As for her piece Auricularis Superior (dedicated to Pauline Oliveros), it represented Great Britain at the World Music Days in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2019.

Molitor is currently a Senior Lecturer at City, University of London. Her work focuses on composition and sound arts, the phenomenology of listening, collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, and unconventional notation.

She is also co-founder of the multi.modal label.

She lives in Brighton, East Sussex.


© Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 2021

Liens internet

(liens vérifiés en mai 2022).

Discographie sélective

  • Claudia MOLITOR, Lofty  gatherings, auto-édition, disponible uniquement en digital (Bandcamp), 2020.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, Decay, 1 vinyle Multi Modal, 2019, m.m04.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, The Singing Bridge, NMC Recordings, disponible uniquement en digital.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, Untitled 40 [desk-life], London Sinfonietta, avec des oeuvres de James Olsen, Christian Mason, Larry Groves et Kenneth Hesketh, 1 Cd London Sinfonietta Label, 2009, SINF CD2-2009.
  • Clauia MOLITOR, Lopsided, auto-édition, 2008.

Bibliographie sélective

  • Claudia MOLITOR, Thor MAGNUSSON, « Curating experience: Composition as cultural technology – a conversation », in Journal of New Music Research, n°50/2, 2021, pp. 184-189, disponible en téléchargement libre.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, « Composition as Hyperobject », 2021, à lire en ligne sur APRIA.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, « Zuhanden », in Tempo, n°287, 2019, pp. 91-93.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, « The Taste of the Apple : composing as process of listening, looking, drawing, and writing », in Colloquium: Sound Art and Music, Zer0 Books, 2016.
  • Claudia MOLITOR, Sonorama: Listening to the view from the train, Axminster : Uniformbooks, 2015.