Hannes Heher

In addition to his creative work, the composer Hannes Heher (born in 1964) is anchored in a particularly diverse way in the Viennese music scene: as a musicologist who is regarded as an expert, especially for the Vienna School, and especially for Egon Wellesz; as an indefinite organizational work and promotion for other composers "functional"; and finally in his "main job" as an editorial assistant in the Austrian Broadcast Corporation ORF (Radio Ö1/Music) as an important contact person for all questions that have to do with scores, even with music as a whole, and especially with new music.

Heher's first musical lessons were by the composer and pianist Wolfram Unger. After graduating from high school, he studied electroacoustic and electronic music, sound, music education and vocal pedagogy at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts, as well as history and chemistry at the University of Vienna. And these diverse interests are finally but not only reflected in his compositions, which are influenced on the one hand by his teachers Karl Heinz Füssl and Heinz Kratochwil, but on the other hand by an intensive examination of the political and musical ideas. Hanns Eislers.

In addition to his work in ORF, Heher took important positions in Viennese and Austrian music life. Since 1998 he has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Egon Wellesz Fund at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, from 2000 to 2006 he was a member of the Board of Directors and from 2006-2014 Vice-President of the Austrian Composers' Association and Head of the Working Group on E-Music, 2004-2006 also Member of the Executive Board of IGNM/Section Austria. After all, he has been a representative of the International "Hanns Eisler Society" (Berlin, Germany) for many years. – And Heher's compositions, whose broad appreciation is documented by numerous commissions from renowned performers, ensembles and orchestras, has been awarded important prizes and scholarships: among others, the scholarship of the AlbanBerg Foundation, the Austrian State Scholarship for Composition, the Prize for Composition of the City of Vienna and the Prize for Music of the State of Lower Austria.

Heher's musical credo appears particularly vividly reproduced by a statement by Hann Eisler: "The great Chinese social ethicist Mo-Ti correctly recognized a substantial inadequacy of music more than 2000 years ago when he wrote: 'That the people are forced to use musical instruments, has three disadvantages: the hungry are not fed, the freezing are not warmed, and the tired are not rested.' (from Mon-Ti, 479-381 BC: 'On the Damnation of Music')." In this sense, for Hannes Heher, music is by no means merely a non-binding edification, but above all an attempt to intervene concretely in the human world, and thus far more than just "playing" with musical material or a retreat into hermetics of avant-garde ivory towers. Especially recently, according to his own statement, it has become increasingly clear to him that "Bertolt Brecht's ideal of an epoch in which man may no longer be a wolf to man" will unfortunately remain an illusion.

Hartmut Krones
Text source: ioem.net