BERNHARD GÜNTER

BERNHARD GÜNTER, born 1957 in Irlich, Germany, begins his musical life playing the drums at age 12, then changes to electric guitar at 17. He moves to Paris in 1980, where he takes up auto-didactic studies of contemporary composition techniques in the libraries of IRCAM and the Centre Pompidou, and attends Pierre Boulez's lectures at IRCAM and Collège de France.

Returning to Germany in 1986, he starts working on computer-based music in 1987; after four years of preparation and one year of work he releases his influential first CD Un Peu de Neige Salie (1993), followed by Détails Agrandis (1994). In 1995, he founds his own label, trente oiseaux. During the following decade, Günter releases numerous CDs and performs his music around the globe. Un Peu de Neige Salie is listed as one of the Top "100 Albums that set the World on Fire" by The Wire, one of his works receives an Honorable Mention at the 1999 PRIX ARS ELECTRONICA.

After a decade of composing electroacoustic music, Günter re-discovers his interest in playing instruments and improvised music in 2004.

"I still think that creating art means taking a material (be it sound, color, stone, words, your body) and shape it into an adequate and significant form (adequate to both the material and the significance; to be more specific - let a sound take its time, a color take its space, use words to transcend themselves —poetry— ...and let the form make the state and the way of functioning of your mind apparent...). I might just add that for this reason, serial and chance procedures (in musical composition) are only worth to be used to create some basic materials; nothing will spare us to make our own choice, take our own decision, and the responsability for the work."
—Bernhard Günter

In 1996, 23five and the Goethe Institute sponsored a presentation of Bernhard Günter's work in San Francisco.

www.bernhardguenter.com