Björn Schmelzer
Björn Schmelzer is a conductor, writer, artist, filmmaker and anthropologist. As artistic director of the Antwerp music ensemble Graindelavoix, he has produced seventeen CDs (plus assorted hybrid-format works), while regularly putting on concerts in Belgium and abroad, and undertaking residencies at art institutions.
About the artist
at home in many disciplines
The extensive research Schmelzer engages in to produce the ensemble’s musical repertoires is further elaborated through essays, lectures and publications that situate his approach at the intersection of speculative theory, psychoanalysis, music and art history.
For Schmelzer, repertoires from the past are like messages in a bottle and must be examined dialectically to reveal how they articulate a break with the horizon of their origin. He is especially interested in how art bears witness to processes of alienation and subjectivation, historical fantasy, Gothic plasticity, ruin and kenosis.
Together with Margarida Garcia, Schmelzer realised the exhibition Time Regained: A Warburg Atlas for Early Music, resulting in an eponymous, two-volume book, published by MER in Ghent; and the films Outlandish and Van Eyck Diagrams, alongside the website darkvaneyck.com, accompanying the latter.
Often invited as a guest conductor and teacher, Schmelzer hosts seminars in Antwerp; and masterclasses for vocal ensembles in Royaumont (until 2019), and Basel (the Schola Cantorum’s Advanced Vocal Ensemble Studies Master programme).
In 2023 he was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture.
