Composer
Biography:
The sound world of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the music of Schönberg, Webern, Stravinsky and Varèse as well as jazz shaped Mathias Spahlinger in his youth.
Born in Frankfurt in 1944, he was taught by his father, a cellist, how to play the fiddle, viol, recorder and later the cello. In 1952 the piano was added. In 1959, Spahlinger began to focus intensively on jazz, took saxophone lessons and toyed with a career as a jazz musician.
Then in 1965 he decided to train as a typesetter while taking private composition lessons from Konrad Lechner. After completing his apprenticeship, he studied composition at the Municipal Academy for Music in Darmstadt and at the State University for Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart.
He received important impulses from Pierre Schaeffer's “musique concrète”. Spahlinger found a style that is characterized by rhythmic tension between sound and noise.
Parallel to his compositional career, he developed a lively teaching activity: as a teacher at the Stuttgart Music School for piano, theory, early musical education and experimental music, as a guest lecturer in music theory at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin and as a professor for composition and music theory at the Staatliche Karlsruhe University of Music. Since 1990 he has been a professor of composition and head of the Institute for New Music at the Freiburg State University of Music.
Albums:
Early Colors / musica viva vol. 16:
