Mathias Spahlinger

His father was a cellist. He taught him fiddle, viola da gamba, recorder, and later cello from 1951. In 1952 he got piano lessons. In 1959 he began to study jazz intensively, took saxophone lessons and wanted to become a jazz musician. In 1962 he left school and took an apprenticeship as a typesetter. During this time he took private composition lessons with Konrad Lechner. After finishing his apprenticeship he continued his studies with Lechner at the Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt. In 1968 he became a teacher at the Stuttgart Music School for piano, theory, early musical education and experimental music. From 1973 to 1977 he studied composition with Erhard Karkoschka at the Musikhochschule Stuttgart. In 1978 he became a guest lecturer for music theory at the Berlin University of the Arts, and in 1984 professor for composition and music theory at the University of Music Karlsruhe. From 1990 he was professor of composition and director of the Institute for New Music at the Freiburg University of Music. Since 1996, he is a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin. In 2012 he declined the Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung [de] grant for his commissioned composition "off" (1993/2011) for the Swiss festival "usinesonore".

Mathias Spahlinger (born 15 October 1944 in Frankfurt) is a German composer. His work takes place in a field of tension between the most diverse musical influences and styles: between Renaissance music and Jazz, between musique concrète and Webernian minimalism, between noise, improvisation and notation, between aesthetic autonomy and political consciousness, Spahlinger's works carry out conflicts for which there are no fixed models.