Klaus Hinrich Stahmer

Stahmer extended his commitment to contemporary music beyond the university of Würzburg to all of Germany. In collaboration with the Hindemith-Institute [de] 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 [de]), Leopold Hoesch Museum [de] in Düren and Spielboden [de], showing works by artists Bernard Baschet (Paris), Edmund Kieselbach [de], Gerlinde Beck [de], Stephan von Huene [de], 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 [de]. 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. Since 2013, Stahmer has been a member of the Freie Akademie der Künste Hamburg.

In addition, Stahmer explored the sonic possibilities of Elmar Daucher [de]'s lithophone, and installations by Edmund Kieselbach. 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 [de], Stahmer uses the Arabic instruments qanun and frame drum.

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.

After a creative phase predominantly characterised by sound experiments, Stahmer sought ways to transfer these experiences to the more traditional playing and singing techniques, for example in unaccompanied solo compositions such as Aristofaniada (1979) and Now (1980). He developed a style that was increasingly based on retrospective, but which only conveyed the model in a broken form, and which was increasingly oriented towards ideals such as beauty of sound, and joy of playing. In a counter-movement, he wrote the musical graphic Birthday Canon for John Cage (1982) and the tape piece Der Stoff dem die Stille ist (1990), countering a lushness of sound decisively with a reduction of means and a withdrawal of expression. Finally, the sound gestures appear concise and clearly cut in the two piano pieces Music of Silence (1994/98) and the duo Nô Theatre, which is reminiscent of Japanese Nô Theatre. Ima (2007).

"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 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." While here the instrumental sound was noisily expanded and broken up, in vocal works such as Die Landschaft in meiner Stimme (1978) a turn towards the phonetic possibilities of the sounds produced with the mouth and vocal cords is also apparent (see illustration).

In the early 1970s, Stahmer had turned away from the melodic and harmonic models of the Schönberg school and given space to a renewed way of thinking about form and sound in his work. Later, he returned to a tonality which operates beyond all functional harmonical connections with the modal sound concepts of "Arabic maqam" (modes) or Far Eastern tunings, and sometimes involves pure (pythagorean) intonation. In addition, there is the special sound world of non-European instruments such as Qanun, Sheng, Koto, Shakuhachi among others, which, due to their special tunings and playing techniques, provide for unusual sound structures in the modern structure of movements. According to Stahmer, this reinforces a tendency that was already apparent in earlier works, in which the musical forms unfold more and more from the sonority as the structure of the movement expands and the time sequences are stretched. In this way, the pieces often come close to archaic musical forms, which Stahmer has experienced working with so-called "primitive cultures". The fact that his music nevertheless sounds rather "western" is due to a clear demarcation from any form of style copying. Stahmer sees his goal rather in an "enrichment of European music through the inclusion of Asian [and other] elements." By responding "seismographically to the development of a global culture" in his music and engaging in "a deeper understanding of non-European music" and "equal dialogue with musicians of Africa and Asia", he has succeeded in opening "new horizons for the art of composition". The closest way to describe this aesthetic position of the composer is the concept of "transculturality" introduced by Wolfgang Welsch.

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

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. 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 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 [de]. 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 [de] and the Gasteig in Munich) and the Three Bagatelles - in memoriam Igor Stravinsky (1992) also reveal a sense for larger dimensions.

Stahmer was born in Stettin. 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. 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.

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (born 25 June 1941) is a German composer and musicologist. He gave added to the development of music in the 1980s through multimedia works, including music with sound art sculptures and musical graphic [de]). He also broke new artistic ground with his compositions for non-European instruments, which can be classified as world music.

In many of his works, Stahmer conveys ideological ideas. Influenced by his own experiences of war and flight, he developed a pacifist basic attitude, which he gave expression to in works such as Quasi un requiem and Singt, Vögel. If in the aforementioned works from earlier times it was a rather general pacifist attitude, for which he sought out corresponding figures of speech in literature and set excerpts from The Colossus of Maroussi by Henry Miller or The Trojan Women by Euripides to music, later the statement sharpened into an indictment of the building of the Berlin Wall (in Wintermärchen), against the Nazi book burnings in Germany in 1933 (in Saved Leaves) and against South Africa's apartheid policy (in There is no Return). Here, too, Stahmer draws on texts by poets such as Heinrich Heine or Sandile Dikeni. He evokes memories of the Holocaust in pieces such as ... che questo è stato ... and Mazewot. The ballet music The Rhinoceroses after Rhinocéros by Eugène Ionesco, created in collaboration with Bernd Konrad, is an appeal against the spread of fascism.