Hermann Heiss

Hermann Heiss (Darmstadt, 1897 – Darmstadt, 1966) was a German composer, teacher and pianist whose career unfolded mainly between his native Darmstadt and Berlin, with formative periods in Frankfurt and Vienna. He is significant for his role in promoting twelve-tone music in post-war Germany and for his teaching at the Darmstadt Summer Courses.

He studied composition with Sekles in Frankfurt in 1921, and later with Hauer in Vienna between 1924 and 1926. On returning to Darmstadt he devoted himself to the piano and to composition. Between 1928 and 1933 he taught music at the Hermann-Lietz school on the island of Spiekeroog in the North Sea. He then lived in Berlin from 1933 to 1937, where he unsuccessfully sought performances of his works. During these years he produced more than eleven hundred arrangements of folk and children's songs, and wrote songs for the Luftwaffe and pieces for military ensembles. He taught theory at the Heeresmusikschule in Frankfurt (1941–1942) and at the Musikschule der Stadt Wien (1944–1945). A bombing raid on Darmstadt destroyed much of his output from before 1944.

From 1948 he taught composition at the Städtische Akademie für Tonkunst in Darmstadt until 1963, and from 1955 he directed the city's electronic composition studio, which was later named after him. He was a regular teacher and lecturer at the Darmstadt courses between 1946 and 1962.

His legacy combines a defence of twelve-tone technique, which he developed in his own way from Hauer's ideas, with a pedagogical theory of musical movement and experiments in collective composition with his students. Part of his electronic work reached audiences through incidental music for film, theatre and radio, while his concert works, such as the Sinfonia atematica, remain testimony to his interest in atemporal... atematic composition.