The jury explained its decision as follows: “With a highly developed sense for unusual sound combinations and timbres, Sara Glojnarić explores the boundaries of music. To this end, she draws on a wide range of scenic-performative, instrumental, vocal, and electronic techniques, which she masters with the utmost technical proficiency. Through its rhetorical and dramaturgical power and originality, Glojnarić’s musical language thus also serves as a mirror of social tensions and upheavals. […] The jury is honoring a composer who, in her body of work to date, has impressively combined the complexity of composition with the freedom of expression.”

Ata Delbasteh, Head of the Cultural Affairs Department, warmly congratulated the award winner and emphasized: “I am very pleased that the jury has once again made such an excellent choice. In her artistic work, Sara Glojnarić consistently engages with the important questions of our time and opens up a whole new avenue for the audience to explore these issues for themselves.”

The Award Winner

Sara Glojnarić was born in Zagreb in 1991, studied composition in Zagreb and Stuttgart, and is now regarded as a recognized figure in German and international musical life. This is evidenced, among other things, by this year’s world premiere of her opera *Station Paradiso* at the Stuttgart State Opera. Sara Glojnarić’s music is extremely energetic and dense, characterized by driving rhythms, yet at other times expansive and nostalgic, as if time were standing still. A recurring motif in her work is the collection and archiving of musical memories. For *Pure Bliss* (2022), she asked the musicians of the Klangforum Wien about musical moments that give them goosebumps. Their very personal responses became the starting point for a composition.

In earlier works such as #popfem, she also turned her attention to material from the digital present: for the piece, she deconstructed misogynistic YouTube videos and revealed the social and political ideas embedded in seemingly everyday media.

Sara Glojnarić has received numerous awards for her work. In 2023, she was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize for Composition. For *DING, DONG, DARLING!*, which premiered with the SWR Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni, she also received the Orchestra Prize at the 2024 Donaueschingen Music Festival.

Her upcoming projects include a new orchestral work for the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and a collaboration with the Deutsche Oper Berlin during the 2027–28 season.

The Schneider-Schott Music Prize

Since 1986, the state capital of Mainz has awarded the Schneider-Schott Music Prize every two years to composers, performers, or music ensembles in the field of classical music who are both deserving of support and in need of it. The focus of the prize, which is endowed with 15,000 euros, is on contemporary serious music. The right to nominate and the decision-making process for appropriately qualified musicians rests with an independent five-member expert jury, chaired by Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Rathert, a musicologist at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. Personal applications are not accepted.