Martin Friedel : Represented Artist
Random Audio Sample: The school of natural philosophy (unaccompanied piano) by Martin Friedel, from the CD School of natural philosophy
Martin Friedel’s music traverses a wide range of forms and genres. He has composed six chamber operas, four large scale cantatas, chamber and choral music and many scores for film and television. Major awards include the Australian One act Opera Award, The Ian Potter Music Commission, the Jacobena Angliss Fellowship and an Emmy.
Friedel came to Australia with his family from Germany as a child. His family settled in Narbethong, a small saw milling settlement on the Great Dividing Range in Victoria and he went on to complete bachelor degrees in physics and mathematics and a PhD in chemistry from Melbourne University. Concurrently, he studied piano with Victor Stephenson and later, conducting with Robert Rosen.
Since the 1980s he composed for film and television. Friedel has created over fifty TV and film sound tracks for BBC, French and US television, ABC and SBS, receiving an Emmy, international awards and two AFI nominations.
Friedel’s early experience and reputation in the 1970s was established in theatre. In the 1970s he composed and directed for a multitude of productions at the Pram Factory, Melbourne Theatre Company and other major Australian theatre companies.
Fed by his experience as a visiting composer at the fabled Berliner Ensemble in 1981, he went on to compose music theatre pieces that were performed in the Edinburgh and Adelaide Festivals. Friedel remains fascinated by the interaction between words and music and writes texts and libretti for his own compositions.
Since 1985, the Melbourne–based ASTRA has premiered most of his chamber and vocal compositions.
Current work includes a violin and piano piece for Miwako Abe and Michael Kieran Harvey, an instrumental work for ASTRA and a new music theatre piece Underworld Song. His collection of piano pieces The School of Natural Philosophy is being recorded by Michael Kieran Harvey for Move Records.
History of a Day, a multi–screen audiovisual installation created with cinematographer Simon Carroll and commissioned by the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) will open the Samstag Museum of Art in Adelaide in 2007.
Biography provided by the composer — current to August 2007