Cécile Marti

Born near Zurich, Swiss composer Cécile Marti developed a great passion for music at an early age thanks to the artistic environment within which she was raised. She learned how to play the violin and piano at the tender age of eight and discovered a fascination for contemporary music not long after. Marti's first musical sketches began to appear while studying violin in Zurich. She continued studying composition with Dieter Ammann at Hochschule Luzern-Musik and reached her Master in Music with Major Solo Performance Composition in 2010. She was working with Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Kaija Saariaho and Malcolm Singer. Marti completed her PhD at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London supervised by Julian Anderson in early 2017. Currently she is doing a postdoc at King’s College in London.

In 2008 Cécile Marti won the International Composition Competition for Orchestra at the 9th Weimar Spring Contemporary Music Days. She received an invitation in 2008 to the International Davos Festival "Young Artists in Concert". The awarded orchestral work „Bubble Trip“ was performed with Lucerne Symphony Orchestra (LSO) conducted by Kaspar Zehnder at KKL. The violin concert „AdoRatio“ was performed by the Collegium Novum Zürich with the soloist Bettina Boller conducted by Michael Wendeberg at Lucerne Festival 2010. Further performances followed at the Tonhalle Zürich Switzerland and at the festival for contemporary music Klangspuren Schwaz, Austria. At the beginning of 2012 her new orchestral work „Wave Trip“ was performed in Sondershausen and Nordhausen, Germany. Her new piece for violin and piano “Thread”, was performed at the festival Musica Nova in Helsinki in 2015. Her most recent work, an orchestral cycle of seven conjoined pieces called “Seven Towers” of a duration of 78 minutes, was premiered in Switzerland by the Symphony Orchestra Biel Solothurn in April 2016. The opening piece of this large scale format cycle was premiered by the Symphony Orchestra Berne/Switzerland conducted by Mario Venzago. The sixth piece had its premiere by the Geneva Camerata. Her works have been performed in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland, UK and the USA.

Cécile Marti was chosen to receive the Werkjahr Zürich given in 2011, a yearly stipend granted by the city of Zürich. She was 2011/2012 an artist in residence in London for six month supported by the Landis&Gyr Foundation. She received fellowships from the Albert Koechlin-Stiftung in Lucerne and the Swiss National Foundation. Marti was composer-in-residence with the Symphony Orchestra Biel/Solothurn in Switzerland for season 2015/16. She has been awarded with the ‘Carte Blanche’ by Fondation SUISA for 2018/2019.