Bernd alois zimmermann wikipedia

The German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann was one of the few musicians to remain independent of various 20th-century musical doctrines and to establish an individual style of composition. In a private, unpublished letter written during this period he stated that he had never actually discharged a weapon at another person all the time he was a soldier.

Wounded early in the war, he was able to resume his education in While a student, Zimmermann supported himself by playing in dance bands. In Darmstadt in he abandoned a musicological dissertation on the use of the fugue in modern music in order to pursue a career as a composer. Throughout his adult career Zimmermann earned his livelihood as a professor of composition and wrote, in addition to his art music, many commercial scores for radio, film, and the stage.

His academic employment afforded him the means to live but interfered with his creative work. Indeed, Zimmermann's most productive periods as a composer occurred when he was able to obtain sabbaticals from his academic appointments. His relative independence from such fashionable, avant-garde approaches to composition as serialism and aleatory music contributed to his inability to become independently established as a composer.

In fact, Zimmermann's work was known only to musicians until after his death, when a larger general audience for his music began to grow. Zimmermann's Catholic education and Christian faith were influential in his compositions and led to the use of ecclesiastical references and concepts in his music.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann (20 March – 10 August ) was a German composer.

Like St. Augustine , Zimmermann believed in the simultaneity of past, present, and future as an eternal moment in the mind of God. Therefore, he developed a technique of quoting past masters in his own modern compositions: his favorites included Bach, Mozart, and Debussy. These quotations are always notated in Zimmermann's scores but may not be noticeable to the listener because Zimmermann so changed both the quotations and the contexts in which they were used.

These quotations were meant to register Zimmermann's participation in an eternally present music, even though the material from the past, a melody or rhythm or some other musical structure, might be seamlessly woven into Zimmermann's own more expressionistic or chromatic or atonal context.