Ivan Acher

Biography

A carpenter, forest worker, designer, musician and composer rolled into one, Ivan Acher naturally blends electro-acoustic and contemporary music. He founded WCAAM, a centre for retraining of trained musicians to become amateurs. As a composer and performer, he has participated in Vladimír Václavek’s VRRM project and Pavel Fajt’s Autopilote, and has regularly appeared with the NUO jazz all-stars mini big band. A seeker of cross-genre and striking solutions, he has employed musical and non-musical instruments, which he himself makes. Since 2002, he has collaborated with and composed approximately 20 pieces for the Agon Orchestra, specialised in contemporary music. Acher’s compositions have been performed at classical music festivals in Prague (Prague Spring), Hamburg, Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Vienna, and other cities. To date, he has written music for more than 150 acclaimed dance and drama productions in the Czech Republic and abroad. He has received nominations for the Czech Critics Prize, the Alfred Radok Prize, the Czech Lion and Dosky awards. He has above all worked with the legendary Comedy Theatre in Prague (Dušan Pařízek’s productions Kvartet Antiklimax, The Trial; David Jařab’s productions The Sufferings of Prince Sternenhoch, Weissenstein, Heart of Darkness) and the Lenka Vagnerová Company (her dance show La Loba, which has received the Herald Angel Award at the Edinburgh Fringe festival; Riders, Gossip, and other productions). Furthermore, he has composed music for a number of productions at the National Theatres in Prague and Brno, as well as other Czech, Slovak and international stages. Ivan Acher has written scores for dozens of feature films and documentaries. He has also created film projections for theatre projects (Magor’s Summa, The Trial, Heart of Darkness, etc.), photograph cycles (Gulliver’s Travels, Males and their Young, etc.) and three collections of poems.