Maxim Seloujanov
Maxim Seloujanov was born in 1967 in Moscow. He began to learn the piano at the age of five and also started to compose. Some years later he wrote his first poems and painted his first pictures. He studied music theory at a music conservatory in Moscow and during this period also composed several works.
Due to his political and ideological views he came up against the regulatory practices of power. He was illegally excluded from the conservatory but managed to be re-admitted again.
In Moscow Seloujanov was one of the organisers of the Youth Symphony Orchestra of the State Radio of the USSR and became its honorary director. He founded the Klebnikov Elektronique Studio for Electronic Music and attempted to cooperate with the Ars Electronica Festival (Linz) in organising the first festival for electronic art in Moscow. The break-up of the Soviet Union thwarted this plan.
In 1990 Seloujanov contacted the composer Boguslav Schaeffer, a teacher at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and moved to Austria. In Salzburg Seloujanov wrote many musical and theatrical works as well as poems. In 1993 Seloujanov staged his play “Hampelmann”. When he completed his studies in 1998 he was a prize-winner at the “Ensemblia” competition for composition in Mönchengladbach. Seloujanov also held lecturing appointments in Salzburg. At first he held a course in the audio-visual studio of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the Paris-Lodron University and later he taught at the Mozarteum University from 1999 to 2004.
In 1999 Seloujanov was awarded Austrian citizenship because of special achievements. One year later he moved to Munich.
In Munich he wrote several works for chamber ensemble, works for orchestra, and pieces for music-theatre including the opera Fräulein Lenin: ja-ja, which in 2004 received the music grant of the regional capital; the opera “Veruka”, a work commissioned by the 7th “A•Devantgarde” Festival; the “Survarianten eines Themas B-A-G-D-A-D” for large orchestra (dedicated to the commemoration of the last Iraq war), the “2ndSinn-Phonie”, which showed an “iridescent colour effect of the music and of the orchestra on the public” (R. Bonelli), and the chamber music piece “Badinage”, which was commissioned by the Bavarian State Opera and described in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as “humour in sound”.
In 2002 Seloujanov was awarded the Theodor Körner Encouragement Prize in Vienna and in Berlin he received a prize from the Neuköllner Opera.
In 2003 the composer and his œuvre were presented by Bavarian Radio in a live broadcast in the series Klassik Plus.
In 2005 Seloujanov was commissioned by the Bavarian State Theatre to write a music-theatre piece for the festival Festspiel+. The work “tele-machia oder eine Ulyssee: Porträt eines jungen Kunstunternehmens” – described by La Tribune as “an inter-active spectacle”, and by the Süddeutsche Zeitung as a “pleasurable happening” – was presented in the summer of the same year.
In 2006 Seloujanov was awarded the renowned Rome Prize and he spent a year in the German Academy Villa Massimo, the most important federal institution for sponsoring highly talented artists.
