Johannes Kreidler

Johannes Kreidler (born 1980) is a German composer, performer, conceptual and media artist.

Kreidler came to prominence with a series of politically charged pieces of musical performance art, beginning with 2008's product placements: a 33-second recording containing 70,200 samples of other recordings, which the composer then attempted to register individually with the German copyright authorities. Later in 2009, Kreidler realised the controversial work Fremdarbeit (Outsourcing), in which he 'outsourced' his commission from Klangwerkstatt Berlin to a Chinese composer and an Indian computer programmer to write the piece on his behalf, imitating his style, for a fraction of the commission fee.

These three compositions came to encapsulate the composer's approach to 'conceptual music', as theorised by Kreidler himself and by the philosopher Harry Lehmann in subsequent lectures, essays and publications. Since 2010, the composer's catalogue has included many more 'conceptual pieces' — often video works for gallery or online display — in addition to large-scale music theatre works like the seven-hour Audioguide (2014), the opera My State as Friend and Beloved (2018), and Selbstauslöser (Self-Timer, 2020).

Kreidler's works have been performed at the Donaueschingen and Darmstadt festivals, Ultima Festival Oslo, Musica Strasbourg, Gaudeamus Music Week, and the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, among others. Kreidler has described this approach in terms of making 'music with music'.

Often his work makes use of a particular digital technology, using the nature and limits of that technology to determine musical parameters.

Kreidler's work is often overtly political. At the premiere of his Fremdarbeit, the composer announced, "Tonight's goal is that no one here will ever vote for the FDP again" (referring to the German Free Democratic Party who are associated with economic liberalism and free-market capitalism).

Conceptual music

Since the early 2010s, Johannes Kreidler has increasingly described his compositional approach as Konzeptmusik or 'conceptual music', a direct reference to the conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

In his lectures and essays, Kreidler has also described other works in these terms, including those of Cory Arcangel, Peter Ablinger and John Cage. Unfortunately there is no music in it'. In composing Minusbolero, Kreidler simply removed the melody throughout, leaving only the accompaniment. Thus, if the original Bolero contained 'no music', Kreidler's Minusbolero contained 'negative' music. 2009/10 — Winner of the Fonds experimentelles Musiktheater NRW Music Theatre Prize 2010 — Winner of the German Authors Award's Young Talent Prize 2010 — Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music Scholarship Prize 2011 — Academy of Arts Berlin Scholarship Prize 2012 — Kranichstein Music Prize Programming Electronic Music in Pure Data (Hofheim am Taunus: Wolke Verlag, 2008)