Première bloodshot mangroves. starved reeds of Philip Przybylo, winner Tera de Marez Oyens-award 2024
On September 13th 2025, the prize composition of Polish-Canadian composer Philip Przybyło has been premiered. Philip is the winner of the Tera de Marez Oyens composition award in 2024 (a commission for a new work) and wrote the piece Bloodshot Mangroves. Starved Reeds for two bass clarinets and electronics. The piece was performed by bass clarinettists Fie Schouten and Chris Watt, who gave an inspired rendition during the Basklarinet Festijn, a part of the Gaudeamus Music Festival at TivoliVredenburg in Utrecht.
Przybyło manages to elicit beautiful sounds from the bass clarinet, combined with 6 previous recorded bass clarinets, all pre-recorded by Fie Schouten. It was an extraordinary experience to hear these pre-recordings merge with the two live instruments. His microtonal approach, with a lush use of multi phonics, creates an atmospheric environment of sounds, sometimes threatening, but in a next moment more mysterious. This work piques one's curiosity and makes us look forward to future works by this young composer.
Philip Przybylo wins Tera de Marez Oyens Award 2024 with Meduza
In the award ceremony, the chair of the award committee applauded the original tailored score, handwritten, still very legible and maybe because, being handwritten, a very personal communication with the players. It shows a clear concept and original use of the strings. The composer creates an exciting sound universe, combining acoustic and electronic sounds.
Meduza for low string trio, live electronics, and tape was performed in a beautiful form specially adapted for this occasion by Antek Cholewinski on cello with tape. The composer explained his composition as follows: “The piece Meduza blends industrial noise music with a traditional instrumental concert setting. It focuses on open string harmonics across 12 spectrally-tuned strings, using bows as "exciters" to create resonances between the instruments. The strings are amplified via contact microphones, with sound manipulated live through a mixer, producing fragile feedback loops that are constantly on the edge of chaos. The score is written to prioritize physical gestures over precise pitches, allowing the musicians to play more intuitively. The title Meduza (Polish for jellyfish) reflects the amorphous, pulsating quality of the music, where the musicians act as parts of a single, flexible organism. The piece has two contrasting movements: the first, Choralvorspiel, is loud and abrasive, while the second, Ombre, incorporates fragments of a French baroque aria over a drone derived from the first movement's noise.”
Philip Przybyło is a Polish-Canadian composer and producer born in 2000. After studying in Montreal, he moved to Amsterdam for his composition degrees at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. His orchestral works, Sonnet and Penta-Concertino, were performed in Montreal, and his ensemble pieces Ameba, W Klepsydrze, and Meduza premiered in Europe. Recently, he collaborated on a multimedia project, Ekloga - Jest Biel - Ekloga (2024), based on Polish poetry. Philip also produces electronic music under various aliases and co-founded the experimental label Anekumena Tapes, performing across venues in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Warsaw.
The Tera de Marez Oyens foundation was founded in 1998 to encourage composers of contemporary music and to foster the public interest in the musical heritage of composer Tera de Marez Oyens (1932-1996). Since 2009 the Tera de Marez Oyens awards objective is to support recently graduated composition talents. The reward (€2.000) enables the composer to write a new short work that will be premiered in the 2025 Gaudeamus Festival. Former award winners were Rocco Havelaar (2000), Calliope Tsoupaki (2002), Natalia Dominguez Rangel (2009), Christiaan Richter (2011), Georgia Nicolaou en Jan Kuhr (shared second prize in 2016), Remy Alexander (2018) and Soheil Shayesteh (2021). Archief
The 2024 award committee of the Tera de Marez Oyens Prize, chaired by David de Marez Oyens: Fie Schouten (bass clarinetist, artistic director, teacher), Coen Stuit (conductor, artistic director, teacher), Aspasia Nasopoulou (composer, artistic director, curator, teacher) en Jonas Bisquert (composer, programmer, community artist, teacher).
Tera de Marez Oyens: "Expressing my adventures and feelings in music and print came naturally to me. [...] To me, playing the piano and violin, and writing music notes, has always been my real life."
Read more in Tera's biography.