Hannes Dufek

Hannes Dufek, born in 1984, is an Austrian composer, improviser and organiser. He first studied philosophy, then continued with musical composition / music theory at the University for Music and Performing Arts in Vienna (MDW) under the tutelage of Chaya Czernowin and Michael Obst. Since his degree in 2012, he works as a freelancer in the field of contemporary music, with an explicit emphasis on (and belief in) New and avantgarde music-making.

In 2014, he was admitted as a doctoral student in the prestigious Dr. artium programme at the Kunstuniversität Graz (KUG) with Clemens Gadenstätter, Manos Tsangaris, Christa Brüstle and Annegret Huber as his supervisors for a challenging dissertation ón “Utopian potential in current music-making”, which he successfully completed in 2019. His own compositional work, consequently, is often occupied with ever new formulations and instantiations of something “Utopian”, a tangible and palpable Utopia by way and means of art, but necessarily and simultaneously adresses the Capitalist present and its challenges, taking a critical stance. In this line, music and musical performance is viewed mainly as a social phenomenon, as a socially emergent form of expression, enabling us to design spaces in which a plurality of approaches becomes viable. By rendering the process of perception itself perceptible, Hannes Dufek wishes to (tenatively, by approximation) register the listener in his or her entirety. Principal strategies in this are the inclusion of different medial layers, the application of “open” strategies in terms of material and form, the purposeful formation of semantically and metaphorically (symbolically) ambiguous works as well as a frequent parallelism of exact notation and graphic or improvisational structures.

In addition to this, he co-founded the group and New music ensemble Platypus (2006) and has been its artistic director until 2019. From 2011 to 2017, he also was an active member of the theatre collective makemake produktionen and contributed as a composer and sound-designer to many successful and prize-winning productions (MOMO or the Legend of Now, The little mole who knew it was none of his business, Atlas of Remote Islands..., among others), and he was also member of the board of the ISCM Austrian section for a period. Hannes Dufek regularly appears as a musician, either on the theatre stage, as an improviser or executing musician in an ensemble. Since 2016, the pop band KAFRA (meaning: camphor) is in existence, in which Hannes Dufek acts as a songwriter, keyboarder, lyricist and additional voice. Their debut album Reverberating Tunes will appear in 2020.

Hannes Dufek received several grants, prizes and sponsorships in recognition of his artistic work. His theatrical works were often highly praised in the press and acknowledged with awards and honorary mentions. Since 2011, some of his music is published by Verlag Neue Musik, Berlin, and as of 2020, it is also part of Babelscores.com. Hannes Dufek is father to a son, he lives and works in Vienna, Austria.