Aleksander Gabryś

Composer

Gabryś has been composing since the early 1990s. He writes chamber, instrumental, vocal, orchestral and electronic music, works for double bass, instrumental theatre, film music and polymedial forms. A tendency towards paratheatrical forms is already present in his early scores.

He studied composition with his father, Ryszard Gabryś; he also consulted Professors Witold Szalonek and Tadeusz Moryto on his works, and later studied with Professor Thomas Kessler at the Music Academy in Basel. From the outset, his work as a composer and performer has moved between musical notation, graphics, textual and asemantic instructions, improvisation, electronics operating across different levels and connections, and algoraving — at the borders where media and meanings interpenetrate and are creatively interpreted, with an awareness of the symbolic dimension of stage gesture.

Eco-Ethno-Polish-Mountains-Spheroid became the soundtrack to Ewa Słowik-Grabowska’s film Nowa Chowańszczyzna and was presented at the electroacoustic music competition in Bourges, where it was awarded a distinction.

He has also written music for films and audiovisual projects, including Alicja Żebrowska’s Avunculus and Carl Cordonnier’s Nocturne, as well as for his own productions.

He has received scholarships from Siemens-Stiftung, the Friends of Warsaw Autumn Society and Swiss foundations, among others, and held an artistic fellowship from the state of Brandenburg at Schloss Wiepersdorf. In 2009 he was awarded a Młoda Polska scholarship by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage.

Double bassist

As a double bassist, Gabryś has worked intensively with new music since the 1990s, both as a soloist and as a chamber musician. He studied with Waldemar Tamowski, Ovidiu Badila and Wolfgang Güttler.

Over one hundred works have been written for him or dedicated to him — from solo miniatures to concertos with orchestra and ensemble. Many compositions bear his surname in their titles.

Composers who have written for him include Ryszard Gabryś, Helmut Oehring, Ulrich Krieger, Douglas McCausland, Edward Bogusławski, Thomas Kessler, Krzysztof Knittel, Junghae Lee, Michel Roth, Nicolas Tzortzis, Erik Ulman, Aram Hovhannisyan, Jevgenij Iršai, Ryszard Klisowski, Piotr Radko, Thomas Wally, Emre Sihan Kaleli and Zbigniew Karkowski.

He introduced works for double bass by Iannis Xenakis, Giacinto Scelsi, Luca Lombardi, György Kurtág, Thomas Kessler, Sofia Gubaidulina and Ilja Zeljenka, among others, into the Polish concert repertoire, as well as the double bass version of Witold Szalonek’s 1+1+1+1.

In 2006, at Warsaw Autumn, he gave the world premiere of Gérard Grisey’s Échanges for double bass and piano, performing from a copy of the manuscript obtained from Paul Sacher Stiftung. Ricordi subsequently published the score, and the work entered public circulation.

He has also performed Klaus Huber’s double bass concerto Erinnere dich an G. on numerous occasions, including with Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva.

He gained experience in early music through postgraduate violone studies with David Sinclair in Basel and through his work with Camerata Vivaldi. With Camerata Vivaldi he also recorded Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons. He also plays the gadułka, a Bulgarian folk instrument, using a fingernail technique.

He co-founded the Polish Double Bassists’ Association and published in the journal Kontrabasista.

The two-CD album BASSOLO. XXth & XXIst Centuries’ Contrabass Music documents a broad span of his solo repertoire; it was reviewed in The Strad, among other publications.

Paratheatrical forms

Performance · live situational composition / instant composition

Many of Gabryś’s works and solo performances take paratheatrical forms. Music can become a micro-theatre of sound or a one-person drama; gesture, voice, movement and the symbolic physicality of the musician-human on stage together shape the form.

Composition and performance collide here with absurdity, ritual, literature and the effort of playing beyond edges. Live electronics, film, live video, meaning-bearing text and creative mixing enter as elements of stage situations and environments.

The double bass often remains a solo and concertante instrument, but it can also become a stage object and one of the protagonists of the drama.

The tendency towards paratheatrical forms is already present in the earliest scores, including Voak gefeustich (1992), and recurs later in extended performance instructions and stage actions — in Bestiarium Fortune Square TrioTrip SinfAct for double bass, horn, violin and large symphony orchestra (2013), meƚAƚɘm (2014), Walser Code (2016), ILINX (2017), BASSBOXTRING (2019), Natural Born Rebels (2019), MANIFESTO PLAYBOX (2020), The Beelzebub Sonata (2021) and, most recently, Katábasis (2026).

Ensembles and collaborations

Gabryś has been a member of Ensemble Phoenix Basel since 2001. He worked with Klangforum Wien for seventeen years, with Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt for twelve years, with österreichisches ensemble für neue musik Salzburg for around twenty years, and with Collegium Novum Zürich from 2001 to 2026.

He has also worked with Ensemble Contrechamps in Geneva, Ensemble Aventure in Freiburg im Breisgau, Musikfabrik Köln, Ensemble Tzara Zürich, MW2 from Kraków, X-Qartett in Basel, Camerata Vivaldi and other ensembles performing new and early music.

In February 2026, with Collegium Novum Zürich, he took part in the premiere of Heinz Holliger’s Doppelspiegel, conducted by the composer; he also performed György Kurtág’s Schatten for double bass and piano and Sándor Veress’s Memento for double bass and viola.

In the summer of 2010, as an invited guest at the final concert of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, he formed Trio Basso, with which he performed at the Orangerie in Darmstadt and in the main hall of the Staatstheater Darmstadt.

As a soloist, he has performed with Gidon Kremer and Kremerata Baltica, the former SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Sinfonieorchester Wuppertal, Sinfonieorchester Basel, Kammerakademie Potsdam, NOSPR, Filharmonia Śląska, Śląska Orkiestra Kameralna, Filharmonia Zielonogórska and Camerata Impuls, among others.

His chamber music partners have included Gidon Kremer, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Sol Gabetta, and Renaud and Gautier Capuçon. He has performed under conductors including Pierre Boulez, Jürg Henneberger, Helmut Lachenmann and Heinz Holliger.

He has performed across much of Europe, North and South America, Africa and the Caucasus — in New York, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Montevideo, Johannesburg, Nairobi, Tbilisi, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice, Porto, Lisbon, Rome, Sarajevo, Novi Sad, Zagreb, Kraków, Warsaw and many other cities in Poland and Switzerland.

He has appeared at festivals and forums including La Biennale di Venezia, Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, MaerzMusik, Ultraschall Berlin, Audio Art, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, Synthèse in Bourges, Musica Polonica Nova and Dni Muzyki Kompozytorów Krakowskich.

In 2020 he was invited to Stanford University / CCRMA, where he taught performance and composition and gave a solo recital.

Recent work

His more recent works include The Beelzebub Sonata — a stage work and film freely based on a play by Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz.

Rio, my Rio, a concerto for solo double bass and ensemble, was premiered on 13 December 2025 at Gare du Nord in Basel by Ensemble Phoenix Basel under the musical direction of Jürg Henneberger, with Gabryś as soloist.

Katábasis was created in 2026. Its first public presentation took place on 6 September at Galeria Toy Piano in Wrocław, during Avant Art Festival. The work remains in development.