Bettina Skrzypczak is awarded the Heidelberg Women Artists' Prize for the year 2020. The award ceremony will take place on 19 February 2020 during a concert of the Heidelberg Philharmonic Orchestra. The 1987 created prize is the only prize worldwide that is awarded exclusively to women composers.

The concert on 19 February - with a repeat on 20 February - will feature the orchestral work Initial by Bettina Skrzypczak. It was premiered in 2007 by the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne at the festival "Les Amplitudes" in La Chaux-de-Fonds. Since then, it has been performed several times, also internationally at the Warsaw Autumn Festival and at the Venice Biennale Musica.

Initial (2004-2005)

for orchestra
2.2.2 2 - 2.2.0.0 - perc - 6.6.4.4.2
WP: 13.05.2007, La-Chaux-de-Fonds
Duration: 15'

Composer note

In my compositions, I attempt to trace connections between the various spheres of life: the latent similarities between internal and external worlds, between intellect and emotion, between science and art. This tendency is also found today in the sciences: the search for overarching laws in the diversity of phenomena. But the research of art obeys different principles. Its methods are subjective; its result is variation. One of the themes I vary is the aspect of movement. Of all the arts, music is undoubtedly the best suited to that purpose because it does not simply represent movement, it is movement itself. What does it mean compose processes of movement? Some aphorisms from the catalogue of possible answers: measuring the physical (external) and harmonic (internal) spaces; switching between sharply defined and blurred figures; the tension between the expansion of the sound and the adventure of the microstructure; sound processes that become psychic energy flows; providing impulses to overcome the inertia of the material, thereby opening up new dimensions of thinking and feeling... And the perpetual question: what is the origin of sound, of movement? What is the impulse; what is reverberation?
— Bettina Skrzypczak

Score of Initial