Klaus Hinrich Stahmer

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (born 25 June 1941) 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. which he directed until 2000. 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 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. and the ballet The Rhinos (after Eugène Ionesco), a joint production with jazz saxophonist . Larger chamber music cycles such as Acht Nachtstücke (1980), the one-act opera Singt, Vögel (1985/86; productions at the Theater Kiel, the 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 '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 , 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 , 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 . 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." 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.

Themes and contents

With a few exceptions, such as the Fantasie for violin or the Solo for double bass, Stahmer's compositions do not belong to the type of works in which playing takes place for the sake of playing. Rather, they are charged with extra-musical meaning and only become fully comprehensible through semantic decoding. In most cases, the themes and contents are revealed to the listener through the texts set to music, because "almost half of his works are closely related to language." Again and again, Stahmer has discovered "new possibilities" to "establish a relationship between the different artistic means of expression, music and the language of words. The spectrum ranges from text setting in the conventional sense to the musical interpretation and paraphrase of a linguistic model understood merely as "material"." Silence is the only Music for sheng and guzheng (2004) MING for sheng, accordion and cello (2015)

Recordings Sacred Site, Philipp Vandré (piano), Kreuzberg Records CD kr 10021 (1998) silence is the only music, chamber music, six pieces for Far-Eastern and European musical instruments, Wu Wei, Xu Fengxia, Makiko Goto, Andreas Gutzwiller, WERGO CD ARTS 8116 2 (2009)