Death of the Swiss composer Klaus Huber
The Swiss composer Klaus Huber died in Perugia on October 2, 2017 at the age of 92, according to a statement on his website.
Born in Bern in 1924, Huber studied violin with Stefi Geyer and composition with Willy Burkhard and Boris Blacher. From 1964 to 1973, he led the composition class at the Basel Academy of Music. In 1969 he founded the International Composers' Seminar in Boswil and from 1973 to 1990 he was head of the composition class and the Institute for New Music at the Musikhochschule in Freiburg/Breisgau.
His students included Brian Ferneyhough and Hans Wüthrich in Basel, Wolfgang Rihm, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Toshio Hosokawa, Michael Jarrell, Günter Steinke, Dieter Mack, Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, Johannes Schöllhorn, Richard Nikolaus Wenzel and a handful of other now renowned composers.
On the website klaushuber.com, Brian Ferneyhough praises Huber's work as being rooted in both medieval and serial compositional practice. Unlike some of his contemporaries, however, he has avoided "being pinned down to a marketable collection of stylistic characteristics, because each of his works is a highly individual response to a clearly focused and technically precise set of circumstances and at the same time a precise, constantly renewed reflection on the relationship of contemporary musical languages to the real, imperfect world in which they are embedded."
From 1979 to 1982, Huber was President of the Swiss Association of Musicians. In addition to countless other important prizes, Huber was also awarded the prestigious Ernst von Siemens Music Prize in 2009.
