Composer Prize 2026
Hovik Sardaryan
Biography
Sardaryan’s growing oeuvre spans orchestral and chamber music. His music is shaped both by microtonality and by a polyphonic multivoicedness or multilayeredness that emerges from a single line. He captures this way of thinking in the term polymonody.
Hovik Sardaryan was born in 1993 in Armenia. From 2010 to 2014, he studied composition at the Yerevan State Conservatory with Ashot Zohrabyan. Supported by a DAAD scholarship, he continued his studies in Germany with Wolfgang Rihm at the Hochschule für Musik Karlsruhe and completed his artist diploma with Arnulf Herrmann at the Hochschule für Musik Saar.
Sardaryan has participated in numerous masterclasses and workshops with composers including Carola Bauckholt, Oscar Bianchi, Fabien Lévy, Toshio Hosokawa, and Péter Eötvös. He has received several awards, among them the 2014 Prize of the Armenian State Philharmonic and first prize at the international Sayat Nova Composition Competition, which aims to bring Armenian musical culture to a wider audience. In the same year, he was awarded the Carnegie Hall Prize, which led to the performance of his work The Flowers of Golgotha. Further recognition includes first prize at the 2019 Trabant Competition of Ensemble Phoenix Basel and the Busoni Förderpreis from the Berlin Academy of Arts.
In the 2021/22 season, Sardaryan was a fellow of the Schwarzkopf Composition Scholarship at the Karajan Academy of the Berlin Philharmonic. In 2021, he was selected for the Roche Young Commissions at Lucerne Festival, where his orchestral work Ikone premiered in 2023.
