Brain City Ambassador Joshua Fineberg

© Marco Giugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2019

01.07.2020
Joshua Fineberg | Boston University Center for New Music

Brain City Berlin

Brain City ambassador Joshua Fineberg started his musical career at the age of five. After studying composition at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, he went to Paris for seven years working as a freelance composer and researcher, then to New York City to earn his doctorate and teach at Columbia University. This was followed by another seven years as a professor at Harvard University. Since 2012 Joshua Fineberg has been director and professor at the Boston University Center for New Music. Berlin is the ideal place for him to work experimentally and creatively as an artist and scientist.

"Berlin is a crucial place for my cross-genre artistic work. Many of my current and future projects have a strong Berlin focus," explains Joshua Fineberg. Since 2012, the Brain City Ambassador has been Director and Professor at the Boston University Center for New Music. He currently lives and works in Berlin. “The interchange between scientific and artistic communities and the cross genre artistic exchanges in Berlin are for me the richest in the world right now,” says the internationally renowned composer and scholar. In his research, Joshua Fineberg uses sound and music as tools to create powerful experiences for listeners. For the past twelve years, a primary focus of his work has been on creating the sense within a piece of music that the work is not just a concrete acoustic and perceptual object but a kind of sonic fiction. In other words “the work is an acoustic perceptual object that is overtly and constantly being shaped and manipulated by authorial and interpretive voices in order to produce specific affects.” says Joshua Fineberg, adding: “Even though this might seem true for all music, I would argue that once this fictional frame becomes overt, acknowledged and an actively manipulated parameter of the piece, things start to change. It is this change that I have been seeking in my recent works.”

The most special aspect of life in Berlin is the intensity and quality of human exchanges, both professional and personal.

Berlin inspires both the musician and the musicologist in Joshua Fineberg. The open atmosphere of the Brain City was the main reason for him to stay: "The special thing about life in Berlin is the quality of human interaction in the city, both professionally and privately. This dynamic has already led to projects and cooperations - for example with the Ultraschall Berlin-Festival for New Music or the Zafraan Ensemble, a group of young contemporary musicians.”

Joshua Fineberg has advised several of his former students to spend time in the Berlin scene. “It is a special place that can only enrich one's own perspective”. After all, the Brain City is “generally seen as one of if not the most dynamic and exciting city for experimental creative work.”