Benno Ammann

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Benno Ammann (born June 14, 1904 in Gersau ; † March 14, 1986 in Rome ) was a Swiss conductor and composer .

Life

Benno Ammann received his first music lessons from his father. After attending secondary school at Einsiedeln Abbey School , he studied at the State Conservatory in Leipzig from 1925 to 1930 (composition: Sigfrid Karg-Elert , Hermann Grabner and Fritz Reuter ; conducting: Max Hochkofler ).

After completing his studies, he held the position of music director at the St. Fidelis College in Stans from 1930 to 1936 . In 1934 and 1935 he took study trips to Paris , among others , where he was able to acquire further compositional knowledge from Arthur Honegger , Darius Milhaud and Albert Roussel .

After attending a master class with Felix Weingartner in Basel , Benno Ammann moved entirely to the Rhine city in 1936. Until 1939 he worked here as a répétiteur and choirmaster at the city theater. He then switched to the opera in Rome under Tullio Serafin as a solo repetitor , but returned to Basel after Italy entered the war in 1941. After a long period of active service in the Swiss Army during the Second World War , he conducted several symphony and radio concerts in Paris , Rome, Geneva , Basel and other cities and was also director of various choirs in the Basel region.

From 1951 he attended the two-week international summer courses for new music in Darmstadt for over 20 years , which at that time had developed into one of the most important forums for contemporary music and attracted important musicians ( Pierre Boulez , Olivier Messiaen , Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen ). As early as the 1950s, the most experimental area of ​​the musical avant-garde at the time , electronic music , was a constant theme in Darmstadt. Benno Ammann also regularly attended the courses offered there with practical lessons in the composition and realization methods of electronic music ( Herbert Eimert and Werner Meyer-Eppler ), which were later moved to the Siemens house in Munich .

Benno Ammann spent the last decades of his life as a freelance composer in Basel, from where he went on frequent stays abroad in order to artificially create tone, sound and noise structures in various studios for electronic music. From 1969 to 1971 he worked at Studio R7 in Rome with Franco Evangelisti , in 1971 and from 1973 at the Institute for Sonology at the University of Utrecht (Netherlands), then at the Instituut voor Psychoacustica en Electronic Muziek (IPEM) at the University of Ghent (Belgium), at the experimental studio of the Polish radio in Warsaw and in 1977 and 1978 in the Electronic Music Center of Columbia-Princeton University of New York .

Benno Ammann died in 1986 while working in Rome.

plant

Benno Ammann's oeuvre includes over 500 titles, which reflect the diversity of 20th century music - from the repertoire of Gregorian chant to new music to electronic music . The catalog of the public library of the University of Basel, which is in possession of the artistic estate of Benno Ammann (see web links), gives an insight into the extensive work. The magnetic tapes with the electronic works are kept as a deposit in the Swiss National Sound Archives Lugano and are documented in the database there. Your digital copies are freely accessible and can be listened to online in compressed form via any Internet connection.

The list of works includes both sacred and secular music, vocal and instrumental music, pieces for solo or ensemble, works from the tonal and atonal range.

The main emphasis of Ammann's first creative period was on vowels and the development of a linear, spiritual choir style. After lengthy experiments with Debussy's hexatonic whole-tone ladder , the result of these experiments was a number of interesting choirs that sound like twelve-tone complexes. These include settings of poems by Meinrad Lienert and Conrad Ferdinand Meyers .

Ammann soon pushed for free tonality and dodecaphonics, without forbidding himself to write in the old style. Chamber music and orchestral works, ballet and stage music were also created. In addition, he excelled as a translator of operas by Giuseppe Verdi , François-Adrien Boieldieus and Étienne-Nicolas Méhuls .

Since 1950 Benno Ammann has devoted himself to the problems of new music, and he turned almost exclusively to experimental and electronic music, where he found new and own compositional design principles.

Many of Ammann's works are characterized by perfect craftsmanship and great musical creativity, beauty and maturity, and in particular by an extremely funny and playful handling of the material - an expression of his professional curiosity and love of discovery, which remained with him into old age.

literature

  • Benno Ammann: Benno Ammann . In: Heinrich Lindlar (Hrsg.): Music of the time - Swiss composers . Boosey & Hawkes, Bonn 1955, pp. 34-38.
  • Benno Ammann . In: Swiss composers of our time. Amadeus Verlag, Winterthur 1993, ISBN 3-905049-05-8 , p. 21 f.
  • Andreas Schenker: Benno Ammann - senior and not a bit conventional . In: Bruno Spoerri (Hrsg.): Music from nowhere - The history of electroacoustic music in Switzerland . Chronos-Verlag, Zurich 2010, ISBN 978-3-0340-1038-2 , pp. 44-48.
  • Andreas Schenker: It started with an adhesive tape: the story of a composer's estate . In: Basel University Library (ed.): Snapshots 2011/12 . Steudler Press, Basel 2011, p. 28 f. ( PDF; 1.46 MB ).
  • Andreas Schenker: Benno Ammann, 1904-1986: Werkverzeichnis = liste des oeuvres . Swiss Music Archive = archives musicales suisses, Zurich 2015, ISBN 978-3-7965-3501-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Catalog: Benno Ammann . Swiss National Sound Archives. Retrieved January 24, 2019.
personal data
SURNAME Ammann, Benno
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss conductor and composer
DATE OF BIRTH June 14, 1904
PLACE OF BIRTH Gersau
DATE OF DEATH March 14, 1986
Place of death Rome