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Tamara Friebel's fascination and symbiosis of architecture & composition has lead to the creation of works which bear a strong specific relation to a place. Compositions which come directly out of an architecture, or worlds created by her architecture become a new haven for a totally new concept of music. This particular approach transcends the everyday, allowing the past to be shrouded in new light. It is her way of building metaphorical bridges over distances of time, to capture a new Zeitgeist in this moment.

Friebel was born in Cohuna, country Victoria in Australia. Her father was a doctor in Kerang where they lived for the first years of her life. When she was 6 ½ they uprooted to the Sahara Desert in Niger, where she lived for the next years before returning to live in the leafy suburbs of Melbourne. Her first musical lessons, recorder & piano, were in Nigeria, where she went to school. They had no violins so she was so excited to return to Australia, where she received her first violin. Soon after she began French Horn with David McSkimming and piano with Meryl Ross. She was offered a music scholarship to Presbyterian Ladies' College, where her musical education thrived. Her first compositions were already performed at school, with the orchestras and choirs there.

She studied architecture at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and sociology and composition (Neil Kelly) at LaTrobe University before taking a plunge to Europe, where she wanted to learn German, to understand more about her German ancestry who were in the Wimmera, but this connection was mainly lost after the war. She knew no one there, but upon arriving in Vienna in 2002 on exchange with RMIT at Technical University Vienna, she joined an orchestra that week, the choir at the Augustinier Church and was in love with the city and its musical life.

Soon after, she applied and sat the rigorous entrance exams, and received a place at the University of Applied arts Vienna in the masterclass of Zaha Hadid, and was most enthralled to get a place in composition at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, eventually in the masterclass of Chaya Czernowin. She then completed a PhD in Composition at the University of Huddersfield, in the UK, with Liza Lim in 2013 with a portfolio of works entitled 'Generative Transcriptions, an Opera of the Self'.

Tamara Friebel — current to November 2022