Klaus Hinrich Stahmer

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (born 25 June 1941) is a German composer and musicologist.

In 1945, the family fled to the West to escape the Russian military.

During his school years in Lüneburg from 1947 to 1960, he received instrumental lessons in cello and piano and participated as a choral singer in oratorio and choral concerts.

After completing school with the Abitur, he embarked on a wide range of music studies, at Dartington College of Arts in England, at the Institute of Music in Trossingen and the Musikhochschule Hamburg, where he took exams in music theory and cello teaching, and the first state exam in music pedagogy for Gymnasium.

He studied further at the University of Hamburg and in Kiel where he was promoted to Dr. phil.

After Threnos for viola and piano (1963) and other youthful works, Stahmer found new forms of expression in collaboration with visual artists, partly using electronic means.

in 1968.

Of his academic teachers, the musicologist Constantin Floros, encouraged and stimulated him to combine musical practice with intellectual penetration and unrestricted openness to contemporary music.

From 1969 to 2004, Stahmer was a university lecturer at the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg, teaching musicology, especially music history, history of instrumentation, theory of forms and ethno-musicology, appointed professor in 1977.

Important impulses came from his collaboration with the Studio für Neue Musik there, beginning in 1970, which he directed from 1989 to 2004.

Since the mid-1970s, he also composed stage works such as the ballet Espace de la solitude and the ballet The Rhinos (after Eugène Ionesco), a joint production with jazz saxophonist Bernd Konrad.

Key works such as Transformationen (1972) and the percussion duo I can fly (1975) show Stahmer as an experimenter who, in addition to visual means of representation, also made use of contemporary poetry and created music with a high symbolic content in chamber music pieces such as Quasi un requiem (text: Henry Miller; 1974) and Tre paesaggi (text: Cesare Pavese; 1976).

Since 1972, he tied instrumentally and electronically realised timbres into temporal processes in which diatonic or chromatic scales makes as little sense as the search for motivic/thematic criteria.

Inevitably, this led to the dissolution of formal thinking, oriented on classical-romantic types, and to experimenting with open forms, which Stahmer presented in some of the forums of Neue Musik in Germany and abroad.

"Not to be underestimated is the role of one's own participation in such performances: Often sitting and acting at the mixing desk or with his violoncello in the midst of the performers, he was able to directly feel and shape his acoustic material without having to take a diversion via a score, and not infrequently the boundaries between the composed and the improvised became blurred."

In 1976, he founded the festival Tage der Neuen Musik (Days of New Music) in Würzburg, which he directed until 2000.

Stahmer extended his commitment to contemporary music beyond the university of Würzburg to all of Germany.

In collaboration with the Hindemith-Institute in Frankfurt, he curated and organised an exhibition entitled Musical Graphics.

The graphic notation by John Cage, Earle Brown, Dieter Schnebel and other pioneers of were presented in the Museum im Kulturspeicher Würzburg and in Frankfurt, and were sonically realised in concerts.

He also organised and realises an exhibition of around 40 sound sculptures, produced and developed by 22 artists from four European countries, which was shown as a travelling exhibition in Würzburg, Kulturforum in Bonn, (Heidelberger Kunstverein), Leopold Hoesch Museum in Düren and Spielboden, showing works by artists Bernard Baschet (Paris), Edmund Kieselbach, Gerlinde Beck, Stephan von Huene, Martin Riches, Peter Vogel created with composers such as Anestis Logothetis, Klaus Ager and Siegfried Fink, and with musicians such as Herbert Försch-Tenge, Peter Giger and Hans-Karsten Raecke.

Compositions and improvisations were documented in an LP edition.

Stahmer has published books, articles and essays on topics related to Neue Musik, and has worked as a journalist for radio stations and magazines.

He gave added to the development of music in the 1980s through multimedia works, including music with sound art sculptures and Musikgrafik). He also broke new artistic ground with his compositions for non-European instruments, which can be classified as world music.

Stahmer was born in Stettin.

Larger chamber music cycles such as Acht Nachtstücke (1980), the one-act opera Singt, Vögel (1985/86; productions at the Theater Kiel, the Marstall München and the Gasteig in Munich) and the Three Bagatelles - in memoriam Igor Stravinsky (1992) also reveal a sense for larger dimensions.

In addition, Stahmer explored the sonic possibilities of Elmar Daucher's lithophone, and installations by Edmund Kieselbach.

In cultural politics, Stahmer was active in Deutscher Musikrat, and was president of the German section of the Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik (IGNM) from 1983 to 1987 and from 2000 to 2002.

He focused on improving the relations between Germany and Israel, as well as the rapprochement of Poland and Germany.

Since his retirement from university service, Stahmer has worked primarily as a composer, and has traveled to the Middle East and the Far East for lectures and study tours.

Whereas he had previously worked mostly improvisationally with sound sculptures, he now systematically developed sound structures in which "sound stones" were combined with conventional sound bodies, such as the string quartet in Crystal Grid (1992) and the accordion in To lose is to have (1999).

Since 1994, the influence of non-European musical forms has increased, such as in the three Songlines (1994) and the one-hour piano cycle Sacred Site (1996), which was premiered in Australia.

Pieces such as There is no return (1998) show that Stahmer's preoccupation with foreign ethnic groups not only has an intrinsic musical effect on his composing, but also includes political commitment to the victims of white tyranny.

The tape piece (with vibraphone solo) Che questo è stato (1999), written over several years, expresses compassion for the victims of the Holocaust.

The duo for the Chinese mouth organ Sheng and the Chinese Guzheng cither Silence is the only Music (2004) opens a series of pieces in which Stahmer draws on the playing style and tone of non-European instruments to represent his musical ideas.

In the cycle Songs of a Wood Collector (2009), written in collaboration with the Lebanese poet Fuad Rifka, Stahmer uses the Arabic instruments qanun and frame drum.

Stahmer's compositions, including numerous vocal and instrumental solos, were often created in artistic collaboration with musicians such as singer Carla Henius, guitarists Siegfried Behrend, Reinbert Evers and Wolfgang Weigel, violinists Kolja Lessing, Herwig Zack and Florian Meierott, accordionist Stefan Hussong as well as specialists for non-European instruments such as the sheng player Wu Wei, Xu Fengxia and Makiko Goto (guzheng/koto), Gilbert Yammine (qanun), drummers Vivi Vassileva and Murat Coşkun.

"Klaus Hinrich Stahmer belongs to the generation of composers who were influenced in their youth by twelve-tone music, Theodor W. Adorno's musical aesthetics and the musical avant-garde of the sixties and seventies, but then sought and found their own way."

Initially influenced by Hindemith, Bartók and Berg, Stahmer searched for new means of expression and developed his own diction by engaging with the visual language of contemporary painters and sculptors.

In multimedia works, he "explored colour and spatial references of music and musical graphics."

Since 2013, Stahmer has been a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg.