Hanna Kulenty

b. March 18, 1961, Białystok, Poland Hanna Kulenty studied composition with Włodzimierz Kotoński at the Warsaw Academy of Music (now Fryderyk Chopin University of Music) and then with Louis Andriessen in The Hague. She perfected her musical craft at the International Summer Courses of New Music in Darmstadt and – as part of the DAAD artistic exchange – in Berlin. She has been working as an independent composer since 1989, receiving creative scholarships and completing numerous commissions. She has conducted composing courses, including in Apeldoorn, Radziejowice and Munich, she was also a visiting professor at Missouri State University. Since 2015, she has lectured at the Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz. She lives in Warsaw and Arnhem (the Netherlands). In her work, Hanna Kulenty has developed a highly individualized musical language based on individual techniques of “polyphony of arches” and the “time-differential polyphony” derived from it. This polyphony deals primarily with the organization of musical form and assumes coexistence in the composition of many energy sources – “arcs” (arising – culmination – extinction) or “dimensions of time” (conventional “short” time against hypnotic “longer” periods). The attempt to touch the latter is connected with the feeling of a metaphysical trance, whose musical representation is the reduction and simplification of the means of musical expression, the consistent inhibition of the development of form, the persistence of rhythmical ostinati. Major awards: 1985 | second prize at the European Competition for Young Composers in Amsterdam for Ad Unum for orchestra 2003 | first place at the International Rostrum of Composers for the Concerto for Trumpet and Symphony Orchestra 2015 | Polish Composers’ Union Award