Sander Germanus

photo of Sander GermanusSander Germanus (Amsterdam, March 16, 1972) studied classical saxophone with Ed Bogaard at the Amsterdam Conservatory and gained his soloist diploma in 1995. By that time, however, he had already begun to concentrate on composition and then went to the Rotterdam Conservatory to study composition with Peter-Jan Wagemans and orchestration with Klaas de Vries. He completed his studies in 1998 and was immediately awarded the incentive prize for music of the Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst for his composition Adamsarchipel. He has taken part in seminars and master classes with Pierre Boulez, Jonathan Harvey and Helmut Lachenmann amongst others and has composed works for the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, Calefax Reed Quintet, Asko|Schönberg, Amstel Quartet, Il Solisti del Vento, Nieuw Ensemble, Quatuor Danel, Studio for New Music Ensemble, DoelenEnsemble, Residentie Orchestra, Percussion The Hague, Aurelia Saxophone Quartet and the North Holland Philharmonic Orchestra.

His study of composition was primarily based on research into the individual character of
Netherlands music, this being the motivation for his composition studies with Luc Van Hove at the Royal Flemish Music Conservatory in Antwerp from 1994. His interest in microtonality grew from that time onwards; he was admitted to the Orpheus Institute in Ghent in 1999, where he gained his laureate diploma with his thesis on microtonal music in the spring of 2005. Since that time he has given lectures on microtonality in conservatories both in the Netherlands and abroad. Microtonality has played a principal role in all of his compositions from 1999 onwards; from his Lunapark Trilogy that began with Lunapark in 2005, Germanus has achieved a natural balance in his use of the microtonal harmonies and the rhythmic devices that he himself developed. In 2007 Germanus was appointed director of the Huygens-Fokker Foundation; centre for microtonal music in Amsterdam. In 2010 he was also appointed lecturer in contemporary and microtonal music at the LUCA School of Arts (Campus Lemmens, Leuven).

 

Homepage: www.germanus.eu.