Gerold Kürten

Gerold Armin Franz Peter Kürten (born October 28, 1927 in Birkesdorf , † April 28, 1993 in Cologne-Dünnwald ) was a German music teacher , composer and orchestra leader .

Gerold Kürten (1992)

Life

The Kürten family grave at the Dünnwald cemetery in Cologne

He was born in Birkesdorf in 1927 as the son of the writer Franz Peter Kürten and his wife Anna Janssen. In 1936 the family moved to Cologne . The first recordings of Gerold Kürten as a musician date from June 4, 1938. Here he appeared as one of three singers in the radio program Wir und die Welt - Pentecostal trip to the Bergisches Land . He attended the Kreuzgasse grammar school in Cologne and graduated from high school in the basement of the Spiesergasse grammar school. Before graduating from high school, he was employed as an air force helper and tank grenadier .

This was followed by music studies and the examination as a choir director (conductor) and for composition and piano. In 1955 he founded the Cologne Youth Orchestra La Volta e. V., which specialized in international music. From 1956 he worked for the youth and school music works of the city of Cologne; In this context he gave courses for guitar and recorder mainly in the right bank of the Rhine and supervised so-called singing classes . He married in 1956, and his children were born in 1960 and 1965. In 1972 the marriage was divorced.

From 1971 he worked full-time at the Rheinische Musikschule . His responsibilities were elementary musical education, theory, recorder, guitar and the later folklore group. At the same time, the folk music group at the Volkshochschule Köln was created under his leadership . In the same year the cooperation with the Altermarktspielkreis of the VHS began under the direction of Richard Griesbach. In 1980 he took over the Cologne Singing Circle at the VHS. Kürten died in 1993 and was buried in the family grave at the Dünnwald cemetery in Cologne .

Act

During and after his studies he often composed, e.g. As early as 1948/49, for example, the piece Der Dom by Heinrich Roggendorf as a cantata , which he later reworked as a four-part choral work. After graduating from 1952 to April 1961, Kürten worked as a freelancer. During this time he did autodidactic studies on Carl Orff , Igor Stravinsky , Arnold Schönberg , Alban Berg and Béla Bartók . He earned money with private music lessons. In 1974 he published the register on people's life and land on the Rhine . In the same year the first contacts with the Cologne songwriter Monika Kampmann were made , and an intensive collaboration between composer and interpreter developed over many years. Kürten worked in the working group for the planning and implementation of the Kölle op Kölsch series of events and the Kölsche Leedcher en d'r Schull series , and he was also on the advisory board of the Akademie för uns kölsche Sproch .

With his music groups, Kürten organized many trips, initially mainly to Europe and later also to non-European countries, not infrequently he performed on behalf of the city of Cologne and as an ambassador of the Cologne language and Cologne songs. One of the highlights was in 1989 the appearance with the folklore play group and the carnival club Hellige Knäächte un Mägde at the 400th anniversary of Cologne's twin city, Volgograd . Also in 1989 the folklore playing group played in the packed Gürzenich in Cologne .

The song collection Loss m'r but still jet sing is his life's work. In a way, his father had already laid the foundation stone, but father and son complemented each other here: Franz-Peter Kürten wrote and collected dialect pieces, Gerold set some of them to music and collected pieces of music himself from the entire Ripuarian language area and took care of their processing and distribution . It is a collection of songs in Rhenish dialect, consisting of three parts, in the form of a loose-leaf collection with many individual deliveries. The foreword of the first volume was written in October 1975. With the 19th individual delivery in October 1992, the work was completed. Many of the Cologne songs in addition to Loss m'r still jet singe , to which Kürten wrote music and / or contributed the text, have been compiled at the Akademie för uns kölsche Sproch . Compositions, song and hit arrangements as well as instrumental arrangements from the estate of Kürten are located in the Institute for European Folklore in Cologne.

Awards

• Rheinlandtaler September 6th, 1988
• Schmitz Order of the Kölnische Rundschau , October 16, 1987
• Magister Lingue et Humoris Coloniensis (Master of the Cologne language and Cologne humor), 1989
• A hall in the regional school Holweide of the Rheinische Musikschule was named after him at the suggestion of the college on June 17, 2000
• Depiction in the picture cycle on 46.5 m canvas "Endstation Ubierring 40" by Professor Hans Rolf Maria Koller , 1993

swell

• Popular life and country on the Rhine
• Academy for us Cologne language
• Folklore play group
• Altermarktspielkreis

Web links

• Literature by and about Gerold Kürten in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ In memory of Gerold Kürten , Günther Noll in Mitteilungen No. 82 April 1995 Cologne Working Group for Rhenish Music History
2. ↑ “De Appeltaat” goes around the world. Gerold Kürten builds a bridge over the 20th century, a biography. Diploma thesis at the Kölsch Academy
3. ↑ Diploma thesis at the Kölsch Academy p. 217 Letter from Dr. Norbert Burger - Lord Mayor of the City of Cologne a. D.
4. ↑ Gerold Kürten - restless "on duty" for a lifetime , Heribert A. Hilgers in messages from the Heimatverein Alt-Köln , No. 90 - October 1993
5. ↑ http://www.zvab.com/singe-Sammlung-Liedern-rheinischer-Mundart-B%C3%A4nde/269253083/buch
6. ↑ Kölsche Liedersammlung  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
7. ↑ [1]