About

Georges-Emmanuel Schneider is a Berlin-based composer, violinist and sound artist whose work pushes the violin beyond its traditional boundaries through live electronics and digital sound processing, building immersive sonic worlds at the crossroads of Avantgarde, Jazz and Electronics. Schneider came to music through one of its most demanding traditions. Eight years of study with Ruggiero Ricci at the Mozarteum University of Salzburg gave him a classical foundation that took him to the Konzerthaus Berlin, Konzerthaus Wien, the New York Metropolitan Museum, Salzburger Festspiele, Wien Modern and Shanghai New Music Week, among others. During this period he worked closely with leading ensembles and composers in the field of contemporary and avant-garde music, an experience that would shape his later artistic curiosity. Alongside his classical career, Schneider had long been drawn to the expressive possibilities that electronics could open for the violin. Hearing a performance by drummer Will Calhoun on the Wave Drum was the impulse that set things in motion. What followed were years of immersion across musical worlds as different as jazz, free jazz, klezmer, funk, neo soul, electroacoustic music, ambient, Anatolian rock, techno, metal and indie rock. In 2018 he formalized this with an IRCAM certification in Max/MSP in Paris. Augmented Violin is Schneider's artistic language, rooted in his own translation of visual thinking into sound. He thinks in timbres the way a painter thinks in shades of colour: texture and atmosphere before structure, harmony or rhythm. On stage, he performs entirely live, combining violin with electronics and beats triggered in real time. His work unfolds through a wide range of collaborations. With Austrian artist TOMAK, he develops sound concepts for visual art exhibitions, the most prominent of several such partnerships with artists from the visual world. In music, his collaborators include trumpeter Rajesh Mehta's Sky Cage Quartet, whose performance at the Moers Festival was broadcast on ARTE and whose album Malagasy Breath was released on Subcontinental Records and featured in Rolling Stone; ambient producer Morgen Wurde, with whom he has released a series of albums on Time Released Sound, Frosti, Form Records and MixCult; Sascha Blach, with whom he performs in indie rock band The Halo Trees (COP International), dark metal project Eden Weint im Grab and folk black metal band Aethernaeum (both Winter Solitude); REER Project with vocalist Esther Kretzinger, exploring the intersection of voice, violin and electronics through the music of Erik Satie; and free improviser Udo Schindler, resulting in two albums on Creative Sources Recordings. A co-production with Swedish band The Dark Side Cowboys is forthcoming in 2026. In recent years, Schneider has appeared at venues and festivals ranging from Moers Festival, Plage Noire and M'era Luna to Gretchen Berlin, and continues to expand the boundaries of what the violin can be.