Andrew Raffo Dewar & Phillip Schulze

Since their last residency at EMS in 2022, Dewar and Schulze’s duo work has shifted from a saxophone/computer setup, to a multichannel analog modular setup, utilizing Serge and Buchla. One goal during this residency is to finalize the recordings made in 2022 as well as to perform and document new music at various studios.

Andrew Raffo Dewar is a composer, soprano saxophonist, electronic musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator.

Active since the late 1990s, his music spans the spectrum of through-composed music, aleatoric and algorithmic composition, electroacoustic music, and open improvisation. He studied with experimentalist composer/performers Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton, Alvin Lucier, and Bill Dixon, and has performed regularly in Braxton’s ensembles since 2005.

Recent work includes original music for his quartet in San Francisco and trio in Hamburg, music for film, compositions incorporating ethnographic materials, biofeedback, cybernetic systems, and electronic music installations and performances utilizing ambisonic spatial audio, often in collaboration with artists from other disciplines.

Dr. Dewar has also published ethnographic research on 1970s intermedia art in Argentina during a military dictatorship, 1960s electronic music collective the Sonic Arts Union, and philosophical issues of ontology in jazz performance and emerging music technologies.

Andrew Raffo Dewar has served as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts in New College at The University of Alabama since 2008.

Phillip Schulze is a composer and media artist. He dedicates his work to exploring the nature and impact of acoustic, visual, and physical stimuli and their phenomena – such as psychoacoustics – and the possibilities of how they can be artistically employed to address the intricate relationships between humans, society, objects, energy, technology, and the environment. Currently, he examines the Western notion of the separation between nature and culture, body and mind, navigating this culturally embedded gap by approaching it as an elastic space of possibility for critical reflection and artistic production.

Schulze’s practice operates at the intersections of composition, sound art, visual art, media art, and performance, resulting in concerts, performances, video screenings, publications, or combinations of these formats. His practice also integrates curatorial projects, academic teaching, and artistic research. In collaboration with international composers, musicians, and artists, he has developed interdisciplinary works in both permanent ensembles and temporary partnerships, spanning concerts, exhibitions, and experimental operas. His work has been performed or installed in numerous sites in Europe, Asia, Australia and North America.

Phillip Schulze studied and worked with, among others, Anthony Braxton, Ron Kuivila and Alvin Lucier. Prior to composition, he studied Media Art and Stage Design at the University of Arts and Design Karlsruhe, followed by a media-art research appointment in Singapore. He received the „Audi Art Award“ as well as an Honorary Mentioning in the field of Digital Musics & Sound at the Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. In 2011 the University of Music Düsseldorf appointed him as Visiting Professor and Head of the Music Informatics Department at the Institute For Music And Media. 

Presently he is finalizing his latest work, the 1st Pastoral, which comprises re-recordings of season-specific electronic augmentations projected sonically into the site-specific and situational conditions of diverse landscapes throughout Germany’s four seasons. Most of the electronic material used was synthesized at the EMS in 2022. 

This time at the EMS, he hopes to generate sonic material for the 2nd Pastoral as well as to work with his long-time colleague Andrew Raffo Dewar on their duo works.