Simon Zöchbauer
Biography
As both composer and musician, Simon Zöchbauer is an enquiring spirit. Freethinking and playful, with the meticulousness of a scholar and the profundity of a philosopher he charts musical landscapes, burrows for roots and looks behind the facades which make up his everyday reality.
He discovered his passion for the trumpet at the age of nine, when a brass band marched past him in New Orleans and paved his way into music. Over time the musician, born in 1988 in Herzogenburg, was exposed to a range of musical styles. He pursued a career as a professional musician after being awarded first prize with distinction in the nationwide Prima La Musica competition in 2003, which convinced him he had found an artistic form of expression. His trumpet studies eventually led him down the Danube from the Anton Bruckner Universit.t in Linz to the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, from where he graduated in specialized concert studies in 2015. In addition to his work with classical music and its technical possibilities, Zöchbauer earlier explored traditional music and its translation into the present. With his now internationally celebrated ensemble Federspiel, which has already played on the best-known concert stages throughout the world (Goldener Saal of the Musikverein Wien, the Berliner Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and many more), he digs down for roots and underlying soil. In his first solo project, with which Zöchbauer now celebrates his debut in March 2019, his compositions open up to contemporary and electronic impulses as well the influences of sacred music. With the release of the album “Achad” and, no less importantly, his role as of 2018 as artistic director of the wellenklænge festival Lunz am See, the present is emerging ever more clearly as the focus of his creative activity. Zöchbauer’s searching preoccupation with the music and its creative conditions unlocks spaces which project out from the moment into the temporal past and future in equal measure.
Discography
Simon Zöchbauer: Achad (2019)
Federspiel: CD Live im Wiener Musikverein (2014)
Federspiel: Federspiel (2010)
Federspiel: Wolperting (2018)
Ramsch und Rosen: Bellver (2014)
Ramsch & Rosen: Bergen (2017)
Federspiel: unerhört BUMM! (2012)
Federspiel: Smaragd <br />(2016)
Drachenhaut und Rosenmund (2012)
Awards
- Prize of the German Record Critics – Leaderboard 4/2012
- Win the “Freiburger Leiter” 2015
- Ö1 Pasticcio – Price (2012)
- 1st prize at “Prima la Musica” (2003)
- Austrian World Music Audience – Award (2011)
- Part of the NASOM program (2012/13 with Federspiel)
- Start scholarship of the Federal Chancellery (2015)
- Austrian World Music Award (2015)
- Part of the NASOM program (2016/17 with junk and roses)
- 1st prize at the German Folkherbst in Plauen – “Eisener Eversteiner” (Federspiel)
- Prize of the German Record Critics 1/2017 album “Emerald” – winner of the leaderboards “Border Crossings” and “Traditional Music and ethical”