Walter Zimmermann. Nomade in den Zeiten

Walter Zimmermann, born on April 15, 1949 in Schwabach in Middle Franconia, received his first musical inspiration from his father. He learned the piano, violin and oboe and made his first attempts at composition at the age of fourteen. From 1968 to 1970, he was a pianist in the ars nova ensemble nürnberg and studied composition with Werner Heider. From 1970 to 1973 he studied with Otto Laske at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. In 1975, on a tour of the USA, conversations with American musicians, collected in the book Desert Plants (Vancouver 1976). 1977 to 1984 Director of the Beginner Studio in Cologne, which he founded. Zimmermann taught composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Liège from 1980 to 1984, at the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1982 and 1984, at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague in 1988, at the Karlsruhe University of Music from 1990 to 1992 and since 1993 as Professor of Composition at the Berlin University of the Arts. 1987 residency at the Villa Massimo in Rome. He has been a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts since 2006 and was appointed honorary professor at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 2009. Walter Zimmermann's extensive and independent oeuvre opens up a wide-ranging panorama of cultural references. This book explores the manifold interconnections of Zimmermann's musical world of ideas, both in detailed analysis and in the presentation of overarching contexts. In line with the composer's intentions, the text repeatedly builds bridges between sound and idea - bridges which, in Zimmermann's case, can always be built in both directions.

"It is captivating to read how this author writes about music, from which intellectual sources he draws, how he combines his findings (e.g. about levitation) with the description of Zimmermann's pieces, not by force, but out of the music. He finds correspondences, delicate links; as you read, you witness how music awakens thoughts and vice versa - how these give the music a resonating space. What a gifted man. I congratulate Walter Zimmermann on such a monograph." (Katharina Raabe)

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