Johannes Kreidler

Johannes Kreidler (born 1980) is a German composer, performer, conceptual and media artist. Kreidler came to prominence with a series of politically charged pieces of musical performance art, beginning with 2008’s product placements: a 33-second recording containing 70,200 samples of other recordings, which the composer then attempted to register individually with the German copyright authorities. Later in 2009, Kreidler realised the controversial work Fremdarbeit (Outsourcing), in which he ‘outsourced’ his commission from Klangwerkstatt Berlin to a Chinese composer and an Indian computer programmer to write the piece on his behalf, imitating his style, for a fraction of the commission fee. These three compositions came to encapsulate the composer’s approach to ‘conceptual music’, as theorised by Kreidler himself and by the philosopher Harry Lehmann in subsequent lectures, essays and publications. Since 2010, the composer’s catalogue has included many more ‘conceptual pieces’ — often video works for gallery or online display — in addition to large-scale music theatre works like the seven-hour Audioguide (2014), the opera My State as Friend and Beloved (2018), and Selbstauslöser (Se