marko ciciliani received his musical training as a composer and electronic musician in new york, hamburg and the hague.
already during his studies he has collected extensive experience not only in the fields of “academic” composition, but also in free improvisation and cross-disciplinary projects. he has written for a variety of settings, like solo-, chamber- and orchestra-works, often combined with live-electronics, and purely electronic works. an additional focus in many of his works lies in the application of lighting as part of the composition, in the form of a specially developed light design. the artistic combination of sound and light was also the topic of his phd research that he completed at brunel university london in 2010.
it is characteristic of ciciliani’s composition that sound is not only understood as abstract material but as a culturally shaped idiom. the exploration of a sound’s communicative potential is as much in the foreground in his work as its objective sonic quality. ciciliani’s work is characterised by a conceptual approach in which aspects of classical composition, sound studies and psychoacoustics play together.
,br> the different “genres” in which ciciliani’s music can be heard and seen, are reflecting his manifold musical activities. his music has been performed in more than 30 countries in europe, asia, australia and the americas. his music has been programmed by festivals and concert series of electronic experimental music like experimental intermedia/nyc, club transmediale/berlin, superdeluxe/tokyo or the nownow series/sydney just as much as by festivals for chamber music like wien modern, forum neue musik deutschlandfunk, zagreb biennale, iscm world music days and many more.
in 2005 ciciliani founded the group bakin zub, an ensemble comprising five distinguished musicians. in the work for bakin zub ciciliani places an emphasis on the combination of instrumental writing, live-electronics and light designs. in 2007 they toured the multimedia work “my ultradeep i” which received critical acclaim. in november 2008 the second program-length project “jeanne of the dark” was premiered at the huddersfield contemporary music festival. currently he is working on the third large scale project for bakin zub titled “heterotopolis”, a collaboration with visual artist marcel bühler in coproduction with the zkm (karlsruhe/germany). ??in 2009 marko ciciliani was recipient of the prestigious villa aurora stipend, a three-month artists residency in los angeles. also in 2009 he was also composer-in-residence of the 14th composers forum in mittersill/austria. he received numerous project-residencies at steim and zkm. ciciliani is guest-professor for electro-acoustic composition at the institute for acoustics and media (iem) of the arts university in graz/austria and lecturer for electro-acoustic composition and acoustics at the university of music and performing arts vienna. he is also visiting lecturer at the university for applied sciences in st.pölten.