Detlev Mueller-Siemens

About Detlev Mueller-Siemens

Detlev Mueller-Siemens was born in Hamburg in 1957. In 1970 he began to study theory, composition and piano at the Musikhochschule Hamburg, starting with composition lessons with Guenter Friedrichs and continuing with György Ligeti from 1973-1980, interrupted by an one-year residence in Paris 1977/78. There he studied with Olivier Messiaen. Mueller-Siemens continued his studies of piano with Volker Banfield and took conducting lessons with Christoph von Dohnányi in Hamburg from 1978-1980 and with Klauspeter Seibel in 1985. In 1981 he was assistant conductor of the production of György Ligeti’s "Le Grand Macabre" at the Paris Opera. From 1986-1988 he was assistant conductor at the Theatre Freiburg.

Mueller-Siemens was awarded numerous prizes and scholarships, so he stayed twice at the Villa Massimo in Rome (1980, 1982) and was awarded the Price of the Hindemith Foundation (1985), the Rolf-Liebermann-Grant (1988) and the Rolf-Liebermann-sponsorship for his opera Die Menschen (after a drama by Walter Hasenclever). Detlev Mueller-Siemens hold a professorship for composition at Music Academy in Basel since 1991. From March 2005, he is professor at the University of Vienna.

He wrote operas, works for orchestra and for ensemble, concertos, chamber music and works for piano. His chamber opera Bing (after Samuel Beckett) has been world premiered at the Bonn opera in December 2001. In 2014 ...called dusk III for ensemble received its world premiere at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna.

Successful international concerts took place with the so-called Subsong works for different chamber music instrumentations. Subsong 1 for flute, oboe, clarinet, piano, violin, viola and violoncello came out in Basel in 2016. Subsong 2 for string quartet in 2018 in Zurich and Subsong 3 for basset clarinet and string quartet in 2022 at the Schwetzingen Castle. The composer wrote: "Subsong is an ornithological term denoting a type of bird song that is not yet structured and not related to species-specific territorial songs or the like. It is therefore free of purpose and only serves to test the vocabulary; perhaps the subsong could also be described as a kind of existential self-assurance."

Detlev Müller-Siemens lives in Vienna and Basle.