Death of the Swiss composer Rainer Boesch
The Swiss composer Rainer Boesch, who grew up in Zurich but then studied in Paris with Messiaen and Schaeffer and was director of the Lausanne Conservatory from 1968 to 1972, has died at the age of 76.
Born in Männedorf in 1938, Boesch moved to Paris in 1966, where he studied composers such as Schaeffer, Bayle and Reibel and the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. In 1968, he won first prize in composition at the Paris Conservatoire for his work Désagrégationthe first electroacoustic work to be honored in this context.
After his return to Switzerland, Boesch performed in a duo with the singer Kathrin Graf and taught and directed various music institutions in French-speaking Switzerland, such as the Institut des Hautes Etudes Musicales (Crans/Montreux), the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze and the Centre Suisse de Musique Informatique. He also spent time at IRCAM (1976-85), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1988) and Stanford University (1992).
In 1996 he became professor of computer music at the Paris Conservatoire. His compositional work includes electro-acoustic music, computer music as well as vocal and instrumental music.
