GEORGES-E SCHNEIDER
VIOLINIST - SOUND ARTIST - PRODUCER
2023
ALBUM RELEASE
RAJESH MEHTA'S SKY CAGE QUARTET
MALAGASY BREATH
2023
NEW COMPOSITION
VISION 67
For the Giacinto Scelsi Festival, I created "Vision 67", a piece that refers to a central figure for the festival. Besides the eponymous composer Giacinto Scelsi, the writer Henri Michaux, who cultivated an artistic friendship with Scelsi, is also very present.
Similar to Scelsi in the field of composition, Michaux was a strong and idiosyncratic figure in the literary world of his time. While his contemporaries were carried away by the fashionable literary trends, he preferred to work in seclusion. His goal was not primarily success, but the search for an independent mode of expression, a language of his own. Among other things, it is described that he succeeded in this by knowing how to combine different, partly antagonistic styles. For example, he wrote poems in the rigid structure of a logbook.
For my piece, I start exactly there and combine musical elements that do not seem to fit together: Violin, both natural and modified, electroacoustic sounds as we know them from sound research, electronic rhythms as we know them from DJs and producers. Text excerpts both as historical recordings, spoken live or rendered as Morse code. The structure of the piece is also hybrid: it is through-composed but not notated, so it has elements of a classical composition as well as elements of a jazz composition.
Henri Michaux plays a role in this piece not only stylistically, but also in terms of content: I have used excerpts from his book "Miserable Miracle" and his film "Images d'un monde visionnaire" as sound material. Both works deal with Michaux's experiences with mescaline. The film "Images d'un monde visionnaire" was a Sandoz production and it is said that Michaux almost convulsively tried to control every detail of the film before concluding that film was not the right medium to express his experiences. With Sandoz and this reference to Basel, the circle closes.
2022
ERIK SATIE
UN THÉÂTRE ACOUSTIQUE
"As musicians with a classical background, we have dealt with Erik Satie’s music numerous times over the past years. Satie as an artist is iconic for many musicians today and is considered as one of the pioneers of minimalism, many see an ancestor of ambient music in his music. But this is just one side of Satie and as we started to think about our contribution to this project, we agreed that we would like to dedicate ourselves to other sides of Satie’s highly versatile personality. Satie is not only to be associated with minimalism, Satie is also to be associated with nightlife entertainment, absurdism, dadaism and satire. According to certain sources, Satie could have meant Vexations as an ironic comment to Richard Wagner’s music, or even as a parody of the meaningless virtuosity of the perpetuum mobile genre.
In our version of vexations, we chose to condense contradictory musical elements and styles and layer them into a dense musical collage held together by Satie’s repetitive musical phrases. We used elements of avant-garde, jazz, techno and electroacoustic music, sometime disassembling Satie’s original chords or re contextualising them into new harmonies. This resulted in a piece of extreme contrasts between extremely fragile lines - especially in the voice - and jarring accumulations of sound. To create a special atmosphere, the voice makes uses of breath as an important element of expression beneath digital sound processing. The violin sound runs through several analog and digital effect chains at the same time, which process the sound simultaneously in different ways and at the same time interact with each other. We also had the idea to integrate the bombastic language of Satie’s publications for the “Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor”, a one-man sect Satie had created, into the piece. Satie supposedly composed Vexations in the same period in which he created his one-man sect and we found quotes related to this one-man sect to be a necessary artistic paraphrase of Satie’s affinity for satire and absurdism."
REER PROJECT
Esther Kretzinger and Georges-E. Schneider
GE SCHNEIDER VIDEOS
GE SCHNEIDER VIDEOS
Rajesh Mehta Sky Cage Quartet Moers Festival 2020
CONCERT - "Black fractions" (Mehta, 2021) by Sky Cage Quartet
Thinking Diary- Hannah Arendt Teaser 2021
FINCH х Marianne Hollenstein performance
RELEASES
SKY CAGE QUARTET
REER PROJECT
SKY CAGE QUARTET & VARIOUS ARTISTS
MORGEN WURDE / SCHNEIDER
MORGEN WURDE / TIS / SCHNEIDER / KONISHI
SCHINDLER / SCHNEIDER
SCHINDLER / SCHNEIDER / PRETZEL
KRETZINGER / SCHNEIDER / COLLINS / DARLING / ENDSTRASSER
KRETZINGER / SCHNEIDER / COLLINS / DARLING / ENDSTRASSER
MORGEN WURDE / SCHNEIDER
JOANNOU / SCHNEIDER / TOSIDIS
BAUER / SCHNEIDER
MUSIC
REMIXES
CV
French-Swiss violinist Georges-Emmanuel Schneider studied for eight years with the legendary violinist Ruggiero Ricci at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg, which was followed by a busy concert life as a soloist, chamber musician and ensemble player throughout Europe and worldwide. Throughout all this time Georges had showed a strong interest for contemporary and avant-garde music. Since years now as a sound artist he also deals with electronic music and searches for new ways of expression with his instrument. In 2018 he completed his expertise in this field in achieving a Max/MSP certification at the IRCAM in Paris. Georges’s violin playing is highly versatile and stands for avant-garde, jazz, free improvising, electroacoustic music, ambient, electronic beats and above all for a unique fusion sound that unites elements of all these music genres in order to create a new way of playing the violin.
The outcome of this work has been presented in several records that have been released between 2017 and 2020: the ambient albums Assassinous Act (Time Released Sound, Oakland California 2017), Für Immer (Off Record, Brussels 2020) and Vermacht (Mixcult, St. Petersburg 2020) with German music producer Morgen Wurde, the free jazz albums Kontergesang and Rhizome with Udo Schindler/Gunter Pretzel (Creative Sources Recordings, Lisbon, 2019) and the jazz/ classical music fusion album Sound of a poem with vocalist Esther Kretzinger (Gramola, Vienna 2017, also available as a LP). The complete performance of Rajesh Mehta’s skycage at the Moers Festival 2020 was broadcasted live by tv channel ARTE TV, featuring Georges’s violin playing. Georges’s work focuses also on cooperating with visual artists as Marianne Hollenstein (Basel) and the fashion label Finch (Kiew), TOMAK (Vienna) or Albert Weis (Berlin).
Georges has performed in venues including the Tonhalle Zürich, Konzerthaus Berlin, Konzerthaus Wien, Cadogan Hall London, LSO St. Luke’s, Brucknerhaus Linz, KHS Hall Taipeh, Bâtiment des Forces Motrices Genève, National Concert Hall Dublin, Rudolfinum Prague, New York Metropolitan Museum, Kulturcasino Bern, Kultur- und Kongresszentrum Luzern, amongst others. He has participated in festivals such as Salzburger Festspiele, Bregenzer Festspiele, Wien Modern, Ultraschall Festival Berlin, Salzburg Biennale, Shanghai New Music Week, Traiettorie Festival Parma, Festival Melos Ethos Bratislava, Biennale Koper, Unerhört! (Bayerischer Rundfunk), Festival Dialoge (International Mozarteum Foundation), Carinthischer Sommer, Sounds of Jazz Salzburg, Salzburger Jazzherbst and the Moers Festival.
Georges is also active as a producer and entrepreneur. He is co-founder and co-director of Kulturhaltestelle, a Berlin based company managing different cultural projects, including music festivals in Germany and Switzerland.
