Samir Odeh-Tamimi is a composer, born in Jaljulia near Tel-Aviv.
He came to Germany at the age of 22 to study musicology and composition. While engaging with compositional role models such as Giacinto Scelsi and Iannis Xenakis, he also found himself coming to terms with the musical culture of his home country. Samir Odeh-Tamimi has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin since 2016 and in that same year was awarded a German Music Author’s Prize by GEMA.
Photo credit: Harald Hoffmann
Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s works are regularly performed at renowned festivals and concert halls throughout Europe, and he has received commissions from Deutschlandfunk, Saarländischer Rundfunk, Donaueschinger Musiktagen, the European Center for the Arts Hellerau, WDR and Bayerischer Rundfunk / musica viva.
As part of the project into Istanbul, initiated by the Ensemble Modern and the Siemens Arts Program in cooperation with the Goethe-Institut, he composed a piece for Ensemble Modern in 2008 inspired by his stay in the Turkish metropolis. His oratorio Hinter der Mauer (Behind the Wall) was commissioned by the RIAS Kammerchor to mark the 20th anniversary of German reunification. SWR’s anniversary concert on the 500th anniversary of the Reformation saw the world premiere of Gidim, a work for orchestra and electronics that deals with Sumerian death rituals. In 2016, the Klarafestival in Brussels commissioned a new work as part of Pierre Audi’s staged version of Bach's St. John Passion. The intermezzo L'Apocalypse Arabe I, performed in between the two parts of the passion, is based on texts by the Lebanese poet Etel Adnan and was also performed in 2017 at the Muziekgebouw Amsterdam and in 2018 at Opera Rouen.
Inspired by the tragedy of Sophocles as well as the writings of André Gide and Heiner Müller, the music theatre piece Philoktet is being developed for the Neue Vocalsolisten and the Zafraan Ensemble.
