HfMT Composer Selected for NDR Workshop

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Haonan Guo, a concert exam student in Prof. Gordon Kampe’s composition class, was selected from among numerous applicants for the NDR Composers’ Workshop.

Haonan Guo often begins compositions with small triggers. A sentence, a gesture, or a recorded voice can become the starting point for a piece. Haonan then searches for the musical context in which this material takes shape. One of the constant and politically relevant questions is which voice actually belongs there.
For Haonan, the subject of memory appears less as a theme than as source material. Personal stories are not retold programmatically, but rather translated into sound, breath, voice, movement, and musical time. The body and voice are important starting points for this because they not only narrate memory but also make it audible and performable.
This approach becomes particularly vivid in Haonan’s work “zer” (2024). The piece draws on the semantic field of melting, dissolving, and shattering, and traces the breakdown of a homogeneous soundscape. A linguistic impulse is transformed into a sonic process. The material does not remain stable; it changes its density, loses its contours, breaks down, and thereby generates form.
The NDR workshop with Missy Mazzoli and the NDR Radio Philharmonic is particularly interesting to Haonan because exchange is an integral part of this approach. She explains that a piece can breathe, react, and sometimes change direction through interaction with the performers. It is about composition as a process in which an initial impulse is further shaped through listening, rehearsal, and feedback. Haonan Guo brings to this an artistic approach that starts from the small and develops a musical world from it.

:About the NDR Composers’ Workshop
The workshop is organized by NDR Artist Across Ensembles Missy Mazzoli as Head Coach and Gordon Kampe as Associate Coach. The program is aimed at composers who wish to further develop their artistic work over the course of several months—through exchange with other composers and the coaches, and in collaboration with the musicians of the NDR Radio Philharmonic.
The six selected composers are distinguished by their diverse musical backgrounds and varied compositional perspectives. The group includes both academically trained and self-taught approaches, as well as influences from popular music and jazz, non-European and non-classical musical cultures.
What they share is an independent, non-standardized approach to contemporary composition. At the same time, they are willing to engage with the specific performance and stylistic requirements of a classically trained ensemble and to incorporate these into their compositional process.