Hans Zender

Hans Zender, born on November 22, 1936 in Wiesbaden, took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses at the age of fourteen. From 1956, he studied at the music academies in Frankfurt am Main and Freiburg and completed master classes in composition (with Wolfgang Fortner), piano and conducting. This was followed by study visits to the Villa Massimo in Rome. Zender worked as a conductor in various positions for decades: In Bonn and Saarbrücken as chief conductor, in Kiel and Hamburg as general music director. He has been a permanent guest conductor of the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg since 1999. From 1988 to 2000, he held a professorship for composition at the Musikhochschule in Frankfurt am Main.
Zender's compositional oeuvre is altogether more difficult to reduce to a common aesthetic and conceptual denominator than that of many other well-known contemporary composers. Rather, one can speak of a juxtaposition of different compositional approaches. "Today I believe I recognize that the deepest impulse of modernism is a turn towards (non-homogeneous, irreducible) multiplicity," Zender himself said.
The volume contains studies on various aspects of Zender's work, ranging from Zender's compositional-aesthetic processes to the role of history in Zender's music theater.
With contributions by Ingrid Allwardt, Werner Grünzweig, Jörn Peter Hiekel, Richard Klein, Ulrich Mosch, Isabel Mundry and Dörte Schmidt as well as an inventory of the music in the Hans Zender Archive.

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