Dániel Péter Biró

MFA (Musikhochschule Wurzburg), MFA (Musikhochschule Frankfurt), Ph.D. (Princeton)
Associate Professor
Composition, Music Theory

MacLaurin Building (Music Wing)
By Appointment
dpbiro@uvic.ca

Brief Biography

Dániel Péter Biró is Associate Professor of Composition and Music Theory at the School of Music at the University of Victoria. In July 2004 Dániel Péter Biró completed his Ph.D. in Composition at Princeton University. He first started his musical studies at the Bartók Conservatory in Budapest, Hungary. From 1991-1992 he was a Fulbright scholar in Frankfurt, Germany where he studied at the Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt. He later studied in Bern and Vienna. In 1995, he did folk music research at the Academy of Science in Budapest. His works have been performed at the Alte Oper Frankfurt, at the Konzerthaus in Vienna, at the Bartók Festival in Szombathely, Hungary and have been broadcast on Canadian, Swiss, Austrian, German, and on Italian public radio. He received an opera commission from the Neue Horizonte Bern/Schlachthaus Theater in Bern, Switzerland in 1998. In 1999 he was awarded the Hungarian Government's Kodály Award for Hungarian Composers. In 2001 his piece The Crossing (Daf), based on a text by Franz Kafka, was commissioned by the Stuttgart Opera. His dissertation Reading the Song - on the Development of Musical Syntax, Notation and Compositional Autonomy: a Comparative Study of Hungarian Siratok, Hebrew Bible Cantillation and Ninth Century Plainchant from St. Gallen (Princeton 2004) deals with historical relationships between notation and orality, as investigated through examples of Hungarian Laments (siratók), Jewish Torah trope and early St. Gallen Plainchant. In 2006 he was a featured composer and lecturer at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music where Mishpatim (Laws) Part II, commissioned by the city of Darmstadt, was performed by the ensemble recherche. In 2006 Dániel Péter Biró was a faculty fellow at the University of Victoria Centre for Studies in Religion and Society: there he researched early Jewish and Christian chant traditions. In 2007 his electroacoustic composition Simanim (Signs/Traces) was performed by members of the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Experimental Studio: this composition was commissioned by the German Radio (HR). In 2008 he was a featured composer and lecturer at the International Messiaen Week in Neustadt, Germany where he lectured on relationships between religious chant and new music. In 2009 he was commissioned by the Quasar Saxophone Quartet, assisted through a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, for the work Udvarim Achadim (And the Same Words), which was featured during their Canadian Tour. In May 2010 he was a featured composer at the Mehrklang Festival in Freiburg, Germany where his composition Ko Amar (Thus Said) was premiered by Noa Frenkel, the Ensemble Surplus and the Experimentalstudio. In 2010 he was awarded grants from the Siemens Arts Foundation and the Canada Council for the Arts to write a new composition for the Ensemble SurPlus.
 In 2010 The ZKM - Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany awarded Dániel Péter Biró the Gigahertz Production Prize for Electronic Music. In 2011 his composition Hadavar (The Word) was granted a prize at from the Austrian section of the ISCM and was given special mention in the Jules Léger Prize Competition. In the fall of 2011 he is Visiting Professor at Utrecht University in Utrecht, Netherlands. Dániel Péter Biró is co-editor of Search - Journal for New Music and Culture.

• Search - Journal for New Music and Culture.
• Personal Web Page: http://finearts.uvic.ca/~dpbiro/