York Höller

York Höller was born 1944 in Leverkusen. He studied composition (with Zimmermann and Eimert), piano (Alfons Kontarsky) and orchestral conducting in Cologne, as well as musicology and philosophy. He also owes important impul- ses to the Darmstadt Summer Courses, particularly Boulez’s analysis seminars. In 1971 Stockhausen invited him to the Electronic Studio of the West German Radio (WDR). During the following years, Höller attained international renown with compositions that melted instrumental- vocal and computer-generated sounds. From the mid 1960s, he worked at IRCAM, and it was also in Paris that his opera The Master and Margarita (after Bulgakov) was premiered in 1989. From 1991 to 1999 he was artistic director of the new WDR Studio for Electronic Music. He was appointed Professor of Composition at the “Hanns Eisler” College in Berlin, as well as at the Cologne College of Music. Höller has received numerous international commissions, scholarships (Cité des Arts, Villa Massimo), and awards (Bernd Alois Zimmermann Prize of the City of Cologne, Promotion Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Prize of the International Composers’ Forum of the UNESCO, Rolf Liebermann Prize for Opera Composers, Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition), and has been invited to give lectures and courses in Europe and America. In 1986 he was named Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic. He is a member of the Academies of the Arts in Berlin and Hamburg. In his compositions, Höller explores serial, aleatoric and stochastic methods, and takes up impulses from philosophy and information science. His concept of “Gestalt composition”, which also owes to Asian or medieval music, serves as the basis of a highly personal musical language that combines subjective impulse and rational control, construction and sensuousness of sound.