Stefan Schultze

Stefan Schultze (b. 1979, Germany) is a composer, pianist, and improviser. Driven by tireless curiosity and a commitment to exploring and redefining what it means to create and engage with present-day music, his work formulates new approaches to using the piano as both a compositional and performative tool. This involves advancing the lexicon of preparations and integrating emerging technologies.

Rooted in collaboration, Schultze’s practice intersects jazz, contemporary music, and prospective tools (and systems), encompassing compositions for diverse ensembles, curating festivals, research, and presenting performances on national and international stages. Regardless of the final form, his focus is on translating, transposing, and synthesizing music from various contexts, with the intent of exploring uncharted sonic territories and inviting audiences to partake in this exploration.

Over the years, Schultze has founded and led numerous award-winning ensembles, collaborating with renowned musicians and orchestras. The Schultze-Ehwald-Rainey Trio, featuring Peter Ehwald (saxophone) and Tom Rainey (drums), epitomizes over a decade of improvisational investigations and deep musical dialogue. Similarly, his duo with Ernst Surberg explores microtonality through real-time control of tuning parameters.

Boussole Animale draws on bioacoustics and spatialized sound. Collaborating with Werner Hasler (live sampling and spatialization), Schultze employs prepared piano, nature recordings, and multi-channel speaker arrays to depict the Earth's core and magnetic field, examinng themes of motion and orientation.

In RadiKits, Schultze joined Franziska Baumann to renegotiate the limits of human-machine interaction. This experimental project uses AI tools, gesture-based controllers, and various techniques piano to create dynamic, real-time, improvised soundscapes.

Our Voices: A Choral Fantasy combined choir, solo soprano, percussion, piano, and eight-speaker spatialized electronics. Based on the Japanese pangram poem Iroha, developed collaboratively with choir members and soloists, the piece explores phonemes as musical building blocks, augmented by electroacoustic transformations that dissolve temporal boundaries.

More recently, with The Buchla Suite – A Handcrafted Tribute to Morton Subotnick, the Large Ensemble led by Schultze revisited Subotnick's seminal electronic work. His latest project is Hyperplexia: Remapping the Piano, which cross-pollinates electronic instruments with live visuals, a grand piano, and a MIDI-controlled mechanical player piano. The work delves into the inner mechanics, logic, history, and cultural significance of the piano, examining its use and representation in both traditional and contemporary contexts.

Stefan Schultze’s extensive accolades include commissions, residencies, scholarships, and grants. He received 1st prize at the International Jazz Festival Granada two years in a row, 1st place at the WDR Jazz Prize, 1st place at the International Competition Artez, a Manhattan School of Music scholarship, as well as a DAAD scholarship. He has collaborated with organizations such as the Goethe-Institut and the German Foreign Office, which resulted in residencies in South-Eastern Europe, Japan, and China. As a professor at the Bern Academy of the Arts (HKB) in Switzerland, he leads the Master’s program in music composition within contemporary jazz, mentoring a new generation of musicians. Schultze's artistic inquiries and their correlation with and influence on his creative process can be found in his interviews and articles written for 15 Questions, Digital in Berlin, and Norient.

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