Stefan Hakenberg

Born in Wuppertal, Germany, composer Stefan HAKENBERG now resides in Alaska's capital Juneau. His work includes a wide variety of musical media. The integration of players of non-western classical background has particularly shaped HAKENBERG's creative thought. Reviewers have praised his music as "highly original," "dramatic and memorable," "creating strong musical expressions in a densely contrapuntal style." Full of innovations his work is an ongoing reflection on the musical styles of today that he has encountered along an international career that has taken him from Cologne's experimental 80s New Music scene to Boston's 90s multicultural academic world, to the particularly Asian combination of influences in Seoul, Korea at the turn of the millennium.

Amongst the presenters of his music are the "Hong Kong Chinese Orchestra Chamber Ensemble," the "El Cimarron Ensemble" from Salzburg, "IIIZ+," "Sagye" from Seoul, "ALEA III," "Dinosaur Annex," "BMOP," and "Arcadian Winds" from Boston, "re-sound" from Melbourne, "The Chicago 21st Century Music Ensemble," "Ensemble Phorminx" from Darmstadt, "The New Millennium Ensemble" from New York, the "Bangkok Saxophone Quartet," "Duo Contemporain" from Rotterdam, "UnitedBerlin," the "Heidelberger Sinfoniker," and the "Gürzenich Orchester der Stadt Köln;" conductors like Thomas KALB, Roger NELSON, Jeffrey MILARSKY, Morris ROSENZWEIG, Richard PITTMAN, George TSONTAKIS, Johannes STERT, Markus STENZ, and Timothy WEISS; and soloists like Claudia BUDER, Phoebe CARRAI, Il-Ryun CHUNG, DAI Xiaolian, Makiko GOTO, JI Aeri, KIM Woongsik, Dimitris MARINOS, MEI Han, Heather O'DONNELL, SAITOH Tetsu, Robert SCHULZ, Jeremias SCHWARZER, Janet UNDERHILL, WANG Changyuan, and Martin ZEHN amongst many others.

HAKENBERG attended the conservatories of Düsseldorf and Cologne where he studied composition with Hans Werner HENZE. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University where he studied with Bernard RANDS and Mario DAVIDOVSKY. Other grants and fellowships brought him to the summer festivals in Tanglewood (where he studied with Oliver KNUSSEN on a Leonard Bernstein Fellowship), Aspen (where he studied with John HARBISON), and Fontainebleau (where he studied with Betsy JOLAS), to the artist colonies "The MacDowell Colony" in New Hampshire, "Yaddo" in Saratoga Springs, and the "Atelierhaus Worpswede" in Lower Saxony. MeetTheComposer, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, various Alaskan arts and humanities councils, and the Endowments for the Arts in North-Rhine Westfalia and Lower Saxony have directly sponsored his work repeatedly.

HAKENBERG is a founder of the Alaskan contemporary music organization "CrossSound," which won a 2002 ASCAP-Chamber Music America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, and in 2005 received an NEA Creativity Grant for a program including HAKENBERG's pansori “Klanott and the Land Otter People” on an Alaska Native story. Films by Theo LIPFERT with scores by Stefan HAKENBERG, "The Displacement Map" and "Taubman Sucks," won awards at festivals in Kansas City, Honolulu, at Portland's Northwest Film festival in Oregon, and three screenings at the Tribeca Film Festival among many more places. In 2007 HAKENBERG was credited with having written the first "climate opera" with his chamber work "The Egg Musher," libretto by Michael KERSTAN, on the topic of global warming.

HAKENBERG's music is published by AUGEMUS Musikverlag, Bochum, Germany and TONOS Musikverlag, Darmstadt, Germany. Recordings are available on the Capstone Records label, Brooklyn, New York.