Zwerger, Manuel

Manuel Zwerger, born in Bolzano in 1992, studied composition with Franz Baur, Simon Steen-Andersen, Niels Rønsholdt and Juliana Hodkinson at the Tyrolean State Conservatory in Innsbruck and at the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus. He received further tuition from Hannes Kerschbaumer and Wolfram Schurig.
As a composer, Manuel Zwerger works at the interface between new music, performance and installation art, whereby visual and extra-musical material is not subordinated to the sonority, but rather made inherent to it.

Intermedially oriented, he pays particular attention to scenic-performative and theatrical aspects that question the socio-aesthetic potential of our media society in an interdisciplinary and multi-sensory way. The thematic focus is on familiar phenomena of music-making and the production of sound, which are combined and questioned with influences from everyday life, pop culture, anti-art, current trends and science. He increasingly works with prepared instruments and new media.

Manuel Zwerger has worked with Ensemble Modern, ensemble chromoson, the NAMES Ensemble, airborne extended, strings&noise, the St. Blasius Academy Orchestra, the Tyrolean chamber orchestra InnStrumenti and various soloists, among others. Long-term collaborations with the recorder player Caroline Mayrhofer and the horn player Samuel Stoll deserve special mention.

He has received various scholarships and grants for his work, including the scholarship of the Richard Wagner Association Vienna (2015), the composition scholarship of the Akademie Musiktheater heute of the Deutsche Bank Foundation (2017-19), the Hilde-Zach Composition Scholarship of the City of Innsbruck (2018), the Starting Scholarship of the Federal Chancellery of Austria (2020), the Heinrich von Mörl Scholarship (2021), the State Scholarship of the Federal Chancellery of Austria (2022), the Hilde Zach Composition Scholarship of the City of Innsbruck (2023) and the Schloss Wiepersdorf Residency Scholarship (2024). His music has been performed in Europe, Asia and South America and broadcast several times on the radio.