Mike Svoboda

Mike Svoboda was born in 1960 on the western Pacific island of Guam. He grew up in Chicago and studied both composition and conducting. In 1982, he won the BMI Young Composers Award and used the prize money to move to Europe. His intensive work with Karlheinz Stockhausen from 1984 to 1996 had a strong influence on Svoboda’s artistic career. The list of composers with whom Svoboda has collaborated in the past 30 years suggests the wide variety of works he has premiered: Peter Eötvös, Christian Jost, Georg Friedrich Haas, Heinz Holliger, Toshio Hosokawa, Helmut Lachenmann, Benedict Mason, Martin Smolka, Mathias Spahlinger, and Frank Zappa. Svoboda has repeatedly been recognized for his outstanding abilities with awards such as the Schneider-Schott Music Prize (Mainz 2000), the German Recording Critics’ Prize (2005), as well as Lower Saxony’s Praetorius Prize for Innovation in Music (2008). Many CDs, primarily for the WERGO label, document his work as a composer and trombonist. In 2005, Svoboda founded the Mike Svoboda Ensemble with colleagues from around the world. Since 2007, he has been the Professor for trombone and contemporary chamber music at the University of Music in Basel.