Prof. Dr. Magda Mayas

Prof. Dr. Magda Mayas is a pianist, composer and performer based in Berlin. She is a professor and researcher at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU), where she has taught improvisation since 2019.

For 25 years she has been exploring the sonic possibilities of the piano anew. Starting from the traditions of the prepared piano and inside-piano playing, she has developed her own sonic language that explores both the inside and the outside of the instrument, using amplification, preparations and objects that become extensions of the instrument.

In 2019 she received her doctorate from the University of Gothenburg with the dissertation Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance. In it she examines tone colour from the performer’s perspective and understands timbre not as a purely sonic phenomenon but as an interplay of material, space and body. In her perceptual timbre maps, she arranges 50 inside-piano sounds by their perceived similarity: the closer two sounds lie to each other, the more similar they sound.

Mayas performs internationally, solo and in changing line-ups, currently in the duo Spill with Tony Buck and in the ensemble Filamental, among others. Concert tours have taken her across Europe, the USA, Australia, Asia, Mexico and Lebanon. She has worked with leading figures in improvised music such as George Lewis, Fred Frith, Zeena Parkins and Joëlle Léandre.

She is a co-founder of the artists’ collective smallest functional unit, which has published experimental scores through Graphème since 2020, and of Khomasi, a Berlin curators’ collective for talks and screenings on art and politics. Residencies have taken her to the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles (2016), the Montalvo Arts Center in California (2017) and the Piano Mill in New South Wales, Australia (2023). She has produced radio pieces for ABC Australia and Deutschlandradio Kultur and released over 50 albums.

At Werckmeister she contributes her experience with tone colour and timbre.