Originally trained on the recorder, Wolfram Schurig studied composition with Hans Ulrich Lehmann and Helmut Lachenmann at the Zurich University of Music from 1989 to 1992 and continued his recorder studies with Kees Boeke. His postgraduate studies were in composition with Lachenmann at the Musikhochschule in Stuttgart.

Schurig holds a teaching diploma with distinction, and, from 1992 to 1994, he taught instrumental teaching methodology at the Landeskonservatorium in Feldkirch. In 1993 he was invited to teach at the Darmstadt Summer School. From 1995 to 2006 he was the artistic director of the Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, where he initiated and co-edited the nine-volume series New Music and Aesthetics in the 21st Century published by Wolke Verlag. Since 2007 he has been a visiting professor at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz. In 2010 he was a guest professor of composition at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy College of Music and Theater in Leipzig. He lectures at the Institute of Musicology at the University of Innsbruck, and he is active as a journalist for the magazines Positionen and Musik & Ästhetik.

Schurig’s works have been performed by the Arditti Quartet, ensemble recherche, Ensemble Avance Köln, Klangforum Wien, Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Musica Nova. They have been conducted by Sylvain Cambreling, Emilio Pomarico, Peter Rundel, Arturo Tamayo, and Johannes Kalitzke. They have also been performed at the Donaueschinger Festival, Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik, Wien Modern, Musikprotokoll (Graz), Akademie der Künste (Berlin), IRCAM, Salzburg Festival, and Klangspuren Schwaz. Schurig writes also for radio (ORF, WDR, RAI, SFB, and Deutschlandradio).

He summarizes his work as a composer thus:

It was and still is less a question for me to elaborate a personal style or to consolidate a constraining musical language, whose vocabulary — once established — must be worked on with self-referential assiduity. Rather, it seems important to me to find a path in which musical perception and — on this basis — artistic experience always become different and, in the best case, always new.

In this, Schurig is an heir to Lachenmann’s concept: “Composing must mean helping the imagination to go beyond its limits.”¹

To accomplish this, Schurig draws on the archival research with which he feeds his historically informed performance practice of recorder music from the 14th to 18th centuries. A great connoisseur of Baroque music, he finds forgotten composers and brings them back before an audience through performance. He synthesizes this knowledge with composing, as in parcours for harpsichord (2013). His tendency to borrow from musical tradition is reflected in several of his works’ titles: Capriccio (2017, 2020, 2022), fünf ostinati (2017), and ricercata (2021). Schurig thinks of these pieces as a return to simplicity in the face of a “new academicism” of contemporary creation where, according to him, “we endlessly produce insignificant things.”²

The Kairos label dedicated a portrait CD to Schurig in 2005, and then a new one in 2021. His works are published by Ariadne Verlag and Gravis.

Prizes and grants

• Grant from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, 2008
• Erste Bank Composition Prize, 2004
• Grant from the International Lake Constance Conference, 1998
• Grant for Science and Art from the State of Vorarlberg, 1996
• Plön Hindemith Prize, Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, 1996
• Villa Musica Scholarship, Mainz, 1993
• Winner of the WDR Composition Competition in Cologne, 1992

^{1. Gérard Dupuy, “Wolfram Schurig: Ultima Thule,” Libération, 3 March 2006.↩}

^{2. “… der neue Akademismus, wo Belanglosigkeiten ohne Ende produziert werden“, in Silvia Thurner, “Von der Faszination des Aufspürens offener Enden: Wolfram Schurig komponiert Neue Musik und wiederbelebt Alte Musik,” Kultur Zeitschrift für Kultur und Gesellschaft, June 2018, p. 76.↩}