Prof. Olaf Taranczewski

Vita

Olaf Taranczewski (born 1977) studied jazz piano at the Musikhochschule Mainz and jazz arrangement and composition with Joachim Ullrich at the Musikhochschule Köln. In 2003 he received the one-year scholarship of the Zukunftsinitiative Rheinland-Pfalz / Villa Musica Mainz together with his duo partner Oliver Fox (saxophone). As a jazz pianist he released the albums Taranczewski Trio (2005) and Speak Silence (2010) on Poet Club Records.  

Since 2006 he lives and works as a composer and music producer in Berlin-Kreuzberg. He never commits himself to any one genre and has composed for the computer games Abraxas and The Great Jitters (Best German Mobile Game 2011, German Developer Award), feature films and TV movies such as Mi America (USA, HBO 2015) and Schweigeminute (2016, ZDF), and since 2011 regularly for the television programmes Frontal 21 (ZDF) and Satirischer Jahresrückblick (ZDF) (multiple nominations for the Grimme Award), TV documentaries such as DNA Cooking (Arte/BR) and Wie wird die Stadt satt (ARD/WDR), as well as theatre productions such as Der Zerbrochene Krug (Theater Magdeburg) and the operetta Turnadot (world premiere Ludwigsburger Schlossfestspiele 2018) with the music-comedy duo Rebecca Carrington & Colin Brown. In 2009 he won the prize for best film music at the Lünen Film Festival for the documentary ANNE PERRY - INTERIORS. 

For the score of Dissonance (director: Till Nowak) he received the German Film Music Award in the main category "Best Music in Film" in 2015 together with co-composer Frank Zerban as well as the prize for the best film music at the festival for animated films in Annecy, France. DISSONANCE was nominated for the European Film Prize at the Berlinale 2015 and received more than 40 international awards. With visual artist Phil Max Schöll (space graphics/scouts) Olaf Taranczewski realised the façade projection Hommage Collage, which was one of the three competition winners of the GENIUS LOCI Festival in Weimar. For Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka) he re-arranged his orchestral works Materials and Lost for piano & string quartet with performances at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and the Volksbühne Berlin in 2018.  

In the trio FOC with Frank Zerban and bassist Chris Ross (Wolfmother) Olaf Taranczewski plays prepared piano and synthesizer and explores border areas between free jazz and electronic ambient music.

He also regularly composes music for advertising and image films, for Polaroid, Panasonic, and Kässbohrer, among others (Questar Awards 2017 in New York: Gold for "Brand Experience" and "Corporate Identity").

Olaf Taranczewski is under contract as exclusive author with Music Sales / Bosworth Music. He is a member of GEMA, the German Composers' Association (DKV) and founding member of the German Film Composers' Union (DEFKOM).

In his function as Professor of Producing with a focus on Jazz and Pop at the Musikhochschule Trossingen, Olaf Taranczewski teaches arrangement, improvisation and songwriting as well as jazz ensemble courses in addition to audio engineering and music production. He gives seminars on topics such as analogue sound synthesis and film music and supervises students in their composition work within the short film project with Nanyang University Singapore. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)