York Höller

York Höller (Leverkusen, 1944) is a German composer whose career unfolded between Cologne, Paris and Berlin, and whose output lies between the instrumental and vocal tradition and electronic and computer-generated sound. His figure is of interest because he combines rigorous training in post-war avant-garde music with an expressive sensibility that moves away from the dogmas of any school.

He studied composition at the Musikhochschule in Cologne from 1963 to 1967, with Bernd Alois Zimmermann and Herbert Eimert, as well as piano with Alfons Kontarsky and conducting. At the same time he studied musicology and philosophy at the University of Cologne and, in 1967, obtained his qualification for teaching music in schools. The Darmstadt summer courses, and in particular Boulez's analysis seminars, were another source of influence. After a brief period as répétiteur at the Stadttheater in Bonn, Stockhausen invited him to create his own works in the electronic studio of the WDR in Cologne, which gave him international visibility. From the mid-1970s, at Boulez's invitation, he also worked at IRCAM in Paris, a city he came to regard as his second home. There, his stage work Der Meister und Margarita, based on Bulgakov, premiered at the Opera in 1989. In 1990 he took over the artistic direction of the WDR's new electronic music studio, after fourteen years as a professor in Cologne. In 1993 he was appointed professor of composition at the Hanns Eisler School in Berlin and, in 1995, returned to Cologne to succeed Henze.

Höller has received commissions, scholarships and international distinctions, among them the Bernd Alois Zimmermann Prize, the Rolf Liebermann Prize for opera composers and a prize from the International Rostrum of Composers of UNESCO. He was made a Knight of the French Order of Arts and Letters in 1986 and became a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1991.

His legacy is associated with the concept of 'Gestalt composition', which he developed from ideas drawn from philosophy, the natural sciences, information theory and Gestalt theory, and which, it seems, also owes something to Indian and Arab music and to medieval isorhythm. His major orchestral works, such as Mythos, Schwarze Halbinseln, Magische Klanggestalt, Aura or Widerspiel, combine a calculated structure with intense expressivity. For him, the pursuit of beauty is not an ideology but a challenge, an idea that sums up his position with regard to postmodern neotonal currents.