Elke Moltrecht

With a focus on new music, Elke Moltrecht has been working with composers at Karsten Witt Musik Management since 2022.

She has concentrated on new conceptual accents and sustainable structures in her work as artistic or executive director and curator in mainly newly founded institutions or forward-looking initiatives. A musicologist by training, she co-founded the Heinrich Schütz House in Bad Köstritz, Thuringia, in the 1980s and was a founding member of the Bosehaus – Bach Archive Leipzig. Since 1992, she has worked at the equally newly founded Podewil – Centre for Contemporary Arts in Berlin and brought the music section to international acclaim as director. Under her direction, Ballhaus Naunynstraße advanced to become an intercultural and interdisciplinary experimental meeting place in Berlin Kreuzberg. As executive director of the federally funded Network for New Music Music 21 Lower Saxony, she anchored new concert and installation formats in the state. She directed the first project of the Humboldt Lab Dahlem, the installation-based exhibition Musik sehen (Seeing Music), and in 2013 founded the ensemble Extrakte for trans-traditional musical practice and research in Berlin, which she has directed to date. Between 2014 and 2019, as executive director, she developed the Akademie der Künste der Welt (Academy of the Arts of the World) in Cologne, with international artists and academy members from a wide range of disciplines and genres, into an institution with cosmopolitan dimensions and wide appeal. Since then, she has moved her centre of life and work back to Berlin.

Elke Moltrecht initiated, curated, and produced further international musical and interdisciplinary festivals, annual programmes and cooperations, which stand for unusual thematic contexts. She has been published in journals and books on experimental and new music, has lectured and given seminars on cosmopolitan curating and concert formats, has been a member of national and international juries and boards since 2002, and is a consultant for artists, grant programmes, and cultural development plans.

She strongly believes that forward-looking forces in music grow out of constant re-questioning and openness on the part of initiators and artists.