Michel Roth (born June 26, 1976 in Altdorf UR, Switzerland) is a Swiss composer, music researcher, and university professor.
Michel Roth studied musicology and linguistics for one year at the University of Basel and then composition and music theory with Roland Moser at the City of Basel Music Academy. After graduating with honors, he spent two more years studying with Detlev Müller-Siemens. In 2001, he was appointed to the Lucerne School of Music, where he worked as a professor of composition and music theory and headed the Studio for Contemporary Music. In this role, Michel Roth collaborated with Sofia Gubaidulina, Pierre Boulez, Péter Eötvös, Helmut Lachenmann and George Benjamin and established the Contemporary Art Performance course in cooperation with Lucerne Festival Academy. On his initiative, the Lucerne Academy for Contemporary Music was founded in 2010. [1] In 2011, he accepted an appointment as professor of composition, music theory and artistic research at the Basel Academy of Music, where he is also a member of the research department. [2] In 2022, he received his doctorate in musicology from the University of Basel. [3]
As a composer, Michel Roth has collaborated with many renowned performers from all over the world, including the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra (Martyn Brabbins), the Basel Sinfonietta, the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne, the Musikkollegium Winterthur, the Klangforum Wien (Sylvain Cambreling), the Ensemble Mosaik Berlin, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, the Ensemble Ascolta Stuttgart, the Stuttgarter Vocalsolisten, and the JACK Quartet. He has been a guest at numerous international festivals, including the Lucerne Festival, Musica Viva (Munich), the Witten Days for New Chamber Music, the Warsaw Autumn, the Days for New Music Zurich, and the Alpentöne Festival, and has served several times as a tutor at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. [4] In 2003, he received a commission from the Swiss Association of Musicians, and in 2005, 2007, 2011, and 2015 from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. He has also received numerous prizes and grants, including the 2007 BMW Composition Prize from Musica Viva Munich for his orchestral piece Der Spaziergang. His first opera, Im Bau, was staged by Georges Delnon at the Theater Basel in 2011 followed by productions in Zurich and Barcellona and later appeared as an audio play and interactive website. [5] The contemporary operetta Die Künstliche Mutter was created in 2016 as a co-production of the Lucerne Festival and Gare du Nord Basel (supported by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation). Many of his more recent works have a game theory background, especially pod (2017) and SPIEL HÖLLE (2021) – the latter work is set in a pinball club in full swing. [6] A wide range of his works are published by Ricordi.
In addition to his artistic work, Michel Roth researches and publishes on musicological and music-theoretical topics [7] . He was co-author of books on contemporary playing techniques for percussion and trombone, the latter of which was awarded Best-Edition at the international Musikmesse Frankfurt 2018. [8] As music curator, he contributed to four interdisciplinary exhibition projects Harmonie und Dissonanz (2006), Neoimpressionismus und Moderne (2008), LINEA (2011), and Dieter Roth and Music (2014) [9] at the Kunsthaus Zug and the Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin. Based on his studies of the group Selten gehörte Musik ("Rarely Heard Music”) (2012–2014), [10] he developed a generalized game-theoretical description of musical indeterminacy, which on the one hand can be applied historiographically to aesthetic processes in John Cage, David Tudor, Sylvano Bussotti, Christian Wolff or Cornelius Cardew, and on the other hand opens up generative new perspectives for contemporary composition and music improvisation. [11] In 2023, he initiated and curated the international festival SPIEL! Games as Critical Practice in the foyer public of Theater Basel with guests ranging from game designer Mary Flanagan to composer James Saunders. [12]
In 2025 he was guest lecturer in musicology at the University of Basel. As an associate researcher at the Uri Institute for Alpine Cultures of the University of Lucerne, he deals with questions of Alpine sound sociology. [13] He is renowned for his discovery of the rich variety of natural resonances of cable car ropes in the Alps (“singing”), for which he developed a special recording device as a citizen science project. [14] Since 2020, he has been documenting his findings in his own sound archive. [15] This data was used equally by the techno music scene [16] and by the industry. [17]