Marti, Cécile

Born near Zurich, Swiss composer Cécile Marti developed a passion for music at an early age. She grew up in an artistic environment. She learned how to play the violin and piano at the age of eight and discovered a fascination for contemporary music. She wrote her first musical sketches while studying violin in Zurich. She went on to study composition with Dieter Ammann at the Lucerne School of Music (degree in 2010). She then worked with Georg Friedrich Haas, Hanspeter Kyburz, Kaija Saariaho, and Malcolm Singer. She obtained her PhD from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London supervised by Julian Anderson in 2017. Currently she is undertaking postdoctoral studies at King’s College, London. 

In 2008 Cécile Marti won the International Composition Competition for Orchestra accompanying the 9th Weimar Spring Contemporary Music Days. In the same year she received an invitation to the International Davos Festival Young Artists in Concert. Her awarded orchestral work Bubble Trip was performed there with the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kaspar Zehnder. Her violin concerto AdoRatio was presented at the 2010 Lucerne Festival by soloist Bettina Boller and the Collegium Novum Z rich under Michael Wendeberg. Further performances followed at the Zurich Tonhalle and Klangspuren Schwaz contemporary music festival. 2012 saw performances of her new orchestral work Wave Trip in Sondershausen and Nordhausen, and in 2015 her new piece for violin and piano read was premiered at the Musica Nova festival in Helsinki. Seven Towers, a nearly one-and-a-half-hour-long orchestral cycle made up of seven conjoined pieces, was first performed by the Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn in 2016. The opening part of this cycle was also performed by the Bern Symphony Orchestra under Mario Venzago, and the sixth by the Geneva Camerata. 

Cécile Marti’s music has been performed in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Finland, the UK and the USA. In 2011 she received the Werkjahr Z rich scholarship of the city of Zurich, and in 2018/19, the Carte Blanche of the SUISA Foundation. She was an artist-in-residence in London (2011/12, courtesy of the Landis&Gyr Foundation) and with the Sinfonie Orchester Biel Solothurn (2015/16). She also received fellowships from the Albert Koechlin-Stiftung in Lucerne and the Swiss National Foundation. 

Selected works: Im Würfel for sextet (2004), Im Kreis for sextet (2005), Octoccatafor two pianos, eight hands (2006), Streifen for quartet (2007), Pulsefor quartet (2008), Bubble Trip for orchestra (2004–7), Trennend Verschmelzen for soprano and trumpet (2007), Traumrede for cello (2005), Oktogon for string quartet (2008), Changing Five for piano (2010), AdoRatio for violin and ensemble (2009–10), Wave Trip for orchestra (2011), Hidden for violin and cello (2011), Trapez for string quartet (2012), Seven Towers 1 – Seven Spaces for large orchestra (2013), Seven Towers 2 – Second Space for large orchestra (2013), Seven Towers 3 – Third Space for large orchestra (2014), Seven Towers 4 – Fourth Space for large orchestra (2014), Seven Towers 5 – Fifth Space for large orchestra and choir (2015), Seven Towers 6 – Sixth Space for chamber orchestra (2015), Seven Towers 7 – Seventh Space for large orchestra and choir (2015), read for violin and piano (2015), Wendungfor piano four hands (2016), Five Times for wind quintet (2017), Forming Sculpture–Sculpting Process for piano trio (2017), Violin plus Five-Dancing Spectra for sextet (2018), In Stein Gemeisselt for string quartet (2018–19), Seeing Time 1 for orchestra (2019).