Memorial Page for Klaus Huber

Klaus Huber (born 30 November 1924 in Bern; died 2 October 2017 in Perugia) was a Swiss composer, violinist, conductor and composition teacher. He worked in Basel and Freiburg, connected new music with older contrapuntal techniques and brought religious, political and non-European thought into his work.

Training and early work

Huber's path first led through teacher training in Basel. He then studied violin and composition, including with Willi Burkhard and Boris Blacher. This connection between instrumental practice, counterpoint and compositional thought shaped his work. He sought music that listens closely, absorbs historical layers and takes human beings in their time seriously.

Composition and attitude

Huber's music belongs to European postwar music while remaining difficult to assign to a single current. He worked with dense polyphony, fine gradations of sound, microintervals and texts from religious, literary and political contexts. Works such as Cantiones de Circulo Gyrante connect Hildegard of Bingen, Heinrich Böll and questions of destruction, faith and responsibility. Later he studied Arab culture and music theory in depth.

Basel, Freiburg and Boswil

From 1961 to 1973 Huber taught at the Music Academy in Basel. In 1973 he became professor of composition at the University of Music Freiburg, where he worked until 1991 and led the Institute for New Music. In 1969 he founded the International Composers' Seminar in Boswil, Switzerland. For many young composers, his teaching became a place where craft, thought and artistic independence came together.

Students

Composers who studied with Huber or were shaped by his Freiburg environment include Brian Ferneyhough, Wolfgang Rihm, Younghi Pagh-Paan, Toshio Hosokawa, Michael Jarrell and Kaija Saariaho. These names show the reach and diversity of his class. Huber avoided a single stylistic rule; he encouraged different voices that developed in very different musical languages.

Recognition

Huber was a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. His awards included the Reinhold Schneider Prize, the Culture and Peace Prize of Villa Ichon and, in 2009, the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize. That honor recognized individual works as well as a compositional way of thinking that placed music, ethics, history and the present in relation to one another.

Farewell

Klaus Huber died in Perugia on 2 October 2017, near his Italian home in Panicale. He was 92 years old. His work remains connected with music that brings religious texts, political questions, historical procedures and precise sound work together while leaving their tensions intact.