Sergej Newski began his studies at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory before specializing in music theory. He then studied composition with Jörg Herchet at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden and with Friedrich Goldmann at the Berlin University of the Arts. He took master classes with Vinko Globokar and Mathias Spahlinger and met Helmut Lachenmann, Beat Furrer, and Helmut Oehring, all the while maintaining contact with Berlin’s theatrical improvisation scene.

Newski has received commissions from the Berlin State Opera, Konzerthaus Berlin, Ruhrtriennale, Klangforum Wien, Scharoun Ensemble, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart, SWR, Deutschlandradio, and the Norwegian Ministry of Culture. His pieces have been played by Klangforum Wien, Neue Vokalsolisten Stuttgart, Ensemble Modern, Nieuw Ensemble, Musikfabrik, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, KNM Berlin, and Ensemble Mosaik. His pieces have been conducted by Peter Rundel, Johannes Kalitzke, Jürg Wyttenbach, Titus Engel, Enno Poppe, Teodor Currentzis, and Vladimir Jurowski, among others.

Newski is interested in polyphonic movement and thought. This is exemplified in his piece Freeze Frame (2014), in which two instruments are each given their own content and beat, creating a polyphony of interactions. In Alles (All), which received the Audience Award at the 2008 Saint Petersburg Music Festival, each instrument is given a different timing, resulting in a complex temporal network. Listeners can also hear an illustration of this polyphony in the BORIS project, in which Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godounov and Newski’s opera Secondhand-Zeit (Secondhand Time, 2018) are performed in the same evening. By drawing situational similarities between Alexander Pushkin’s characters in Boris Godounov and those of Svetlana Alexievitch in Secondhand Time, and by having them played by the same actors, Newski creates an extension of, and a dialogue between, the two works.

In Fluss (2003) — a piece that earned first place in the City of Stuttgart Composition Prize in 2006 — Newski reworked the texts of director Harmony Korine, the first American representative of Dogme 95, a cinematic movement founded by directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Reacting against formulaic English-speaking productions and seeking direct contact with reality, this movement inspired Korine’s texts as well as Newski’s composition of the piece. Each isolated physical action of a musician has an expressivity that becomes relativized by the actions’ uniform appearance or by the complex superpositions of multiple processes.

Newski worked as a theater composer for the Moscow Art Theatre and the Comédie de Genève. He was also dramaturge for Olga Neuwirth’s opera American Lulu (2006-2011) for the Komische Oper Berlin. In 2012, his opera Franziskus (2008) was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow under the direction of Philipp Chizhevsky.

He has received grants from Casa Baldi, Villa Serpentara, Künstlerhof Schreyahn, Cité Internationale des Arts de Paris, the Berlin Senate, and the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. From 2011 to 2012, he was also music curator for the project Platform, a series of events at the Winzavod center for contemporary arts in Moscow.

He has given composition masterclasses in Moscow, Kiev, and Viitasaari, to name a few, and has been invited to lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, California Institute of Arts in Los Angeles, Saint Petersburg State University, Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, and the Hochschulen für Musik of Berlin, Bremen, Dresden, and Hannover.

Newski lives in Berlin, and his works are released by Ricordi.