Hristina Susak (born 1996) has been composing since she was eight. At the age of seven she started playing the violin and soon after that the piano.
In 2013 (aged 17), she started her studies in the field of composition at the University of Music and Performing arts in Vienna. In 2019 she graduated in Music Theory and in January 2022 she is finishing her Composition Studies in the class of Prof. Iris ter Schiphorst at the same university. She was awarded with the Prize of the City of Vienna for the section of music for the year 2021.
From October 2021 she teaches “Tonsatz” at Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig. 2021 she was selected as one of four winners of the Call for Scores from PHACE Ensemble and Ö1 Vienna. She also won Second Prize at the 3rd International Composers Competition “New Music Generation 2021”.
Since 2013 her compositions have been actively performed by some significant ensembles and orchestras throughout Europe, among them piece ”INFANS” was performed by world renown Ensemble Intercontemporain in Philharmonie de Paris (2020), her string quartet ”PRISMA” was performed by Arditti Quartet within the Wien modern Festival (2020), orchestral piece “Seven Days” was premiered by Tonkünstler Orchestra at the Grafenegg Festival within the Ink Still Wet Workshop with Toshio Hoskawa (2021), emsemble piece “EXISTO” was performed by Phace Ensemble at Radiokulturhaus Vienna and within the Aspekte Festival Salzburg, also chamber piece ”ANIMA” was performed by ascolta ensemble within the ECLAT-Festival in Theaterhaus Stuttgart (2019); ”Skrik” was premiered by Sepia Ensemble within the festival festival Poznańska Wiosna Muzyczna in Poznan (2019); and ”SKRIK” for big Symphony Orchestra was premiered by Bruckner Orchester Linz with the conductor Markus Poschner at the Bruckneruni Linz (2018). During the season 2018/19 she was invited by Volkstheater in Vienna to compose and perform music for theater piece ”Watschenmann” (by Berenice Hebenstreit). Some of her works has been published as for example piece ”Transformations for 4 Bassoons and Contrabassoon” by Firma Doblinger within the project HolzBlechSchlag (2019) and her song ”LIE” was featured soundtrack in movie „Gipsy Queen“ (by Hüseyin Tabak, 2019).
Since 2015, she has also been an active conceptual performance artist, which allows her to combine many fields of her interests and abilities: composition, mathematics, philosophy, dance, painting, and stage performance. She was selected among 12 artists by Marina Abramovic to participate in her masterclass (MSUB/MOCAB Belgrade 2019) in which she made a video-performance “Dies Irae“.
Besides composition and performance, she is also an active music theorist and researcher. Since 2016, she has participated at numerous conferences and congresses throughout Europe, where she has exposed many of her scientific and analytic works. Her presentation “Mathematical proportions and its impact on music in Sofia Gubajdulina’s Offertorium” was shown at the congress recherche du CIERA, Sorbonne-Université et de la Hochschule für Musik und Theater Leipzig 2017–2019 at Sorbonne-Université in Paris (2018). Another presentation, “Shostakovich’s orchestration. His symphonies 1-5 as a mirror of a cataclysmic Land”, was featured at Third Congress of the Society for Theory of Music (OTM) at the Moscow state Conservatory P.I Tschaikovsky (2017), and finally, her presentation “A new Perspective and multiple Ways to analyze Edgar Varèse’s Ionisation” was delivered at the Austrian Society of Music (2018).