Hans-Jürgen von Bose

After an unsettled adolescence, Bose entered the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt in 1969, where he received instruction in piano and music theory. Upon graduating from the conservatory, he studied composition (under Hans Ulrich Engelmann), piano ( under Klaus Billing), and conducting at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts. After attending the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in 1974 and the premiere of his First String Quartet, he was awarded several scholarships, among others from the Mozart Foundation and the German National Academic Foundation. In 1976, Bose dropped out of school in Frankfurt and settled in Munich as a freelance artist. The following works like Morphogenesis (1976), Das Diplom (1976), Die Nacht aus Blei (1981), 63: Dream Palace (1990), among others, he received numerous grants and awards:

• German Academy Rome Villa Massimo (1980/1985)
• German Critics Prize (1981)
• Schneider-Schott Music Prize, Mainz (1988)
• Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (1994)
• Prize of the Christoph and Stephan Kaske Foundation for the recognition of Bose's educational merits (1998)

He received commissions from renowned orchestras and opera houses including Idyllen (1982/83) for the Berlin Philharmonic. In the 1980s, Bose became a member of the jury of the "Summer Music Festival Hitzacker" as well as a lecturer at the "Young Composers' Meeting" in Weikersheim. After a visiting professorship for composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum he succeeded Wilhelm Killmayer as professor of composition at the University of Music and Theater in Munich in 1992 (until 2007). Now he is teaching again at University of Music and Theater in Munich since 2012.

As a teacher, he has decisively influenced the work of, among others, Lutz Landwehr von Pragenau and Klaus Schedl.

Hans-Jürgen von Bose moved in 2011 from Berlin to Zorneding near Munich.

Hans-Jürgen von Bose's early works are characterized by the juxtaposition and interlocking of structural and public sound elements. Surmounting serial methods of composition and advocating a subjective semantics designated as the "New Simplicity" starting with the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1978 (this was also true for other composers such as Wolfgang Rihm and Detlev Müller-Siemens), the connotations of this term could not cover the structure and complex treatment of time of their compositions. In its consensus against serial constructive thinking, the trend known in the 1970s by the catchphrase "New Subjectivity", gave significant impulses for a new concept of material by turning away from an objective understanding of them.

The label "New Simplicity" was misapplied to Bose's works starting with the String Trio of 1978, though it does point to the presence of an important, though intimate and concealed semantic dimension in his works which can be directly experienced. Beginning in 1989 with the opera 63: Dream Palace, Bose has enriched the process of temporal layering and serial organization characteristic of his music, in a spirit of reflective postmodernism, by borrowing stylistic elements from the past and present.[1]

He wrote the libretto for 63: Dream Palace himself after the novella by James Purdy. It was premiered at the second Munich Biennale in 1990. The heterogeneity of post-modernism is processed through the different reflected styles. A highlight of this period is the opera Slaughterhouse V (1996), whose libretto is based on the novel Slaughterhouse 5, or the children's crusade, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Bridge-building between modernism and post-modernism appears as a significant aspect of Bose's work.

• Search for a new ideal of beauty. In: E. Thomas, holiday courses '78. (= Darmstadt contributions to New Music 17)
• "Mit der Zeit springt gegen die Langeweile. Schlachthaus 5: Ein Plädoyer für die moderne Oper". In "Theater ist ein Traumort": Opern des 20. Jahrhunderts von Janáček bis Widmann, edited by Hanspeter Krellmann and Jürgen Schläder, 350–54. Berlin: Henschel, 2005. ISBN 3-89487-505-4.

• Bose, Hans-Jürgen von. 2005. "Mit der Zeit springt gegen die Langeweile. Schlachthaus 5: Ein Plädoyer für die moderne Oper". In "Theater ist ein Traumort": Opern des 20. Jahrhunderts von Janáček bis Widmann, edited by Hanspeter Krellmann and Jürgen Schläder, 350–54. Berlin: Henschel. ISBN 3-89487-505-4.
• Mauser, Siegfried. 2001. "Bose, Hans-Jürgen von". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.

• Hauser, Florian. 2005. " Hans-Jürgen von Bose—Augenblicke, oder, Zeit ist relativ: Einige Gedanken über Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim". In "Theater ist ein Traumort": Opern des 20. Jahrhunderts von Janáček bis Widmann, edited by Hanspeter Krellmann and Jürgen Schläder, 355–58. Berlin: Henschel. ISBN 3-89487-505-4.
• Mauser, Siegfried. 2002. "Hans-Jürgen von Bose". Komponisten der Gegenwart: Loseblatt-Lexikon—Nachlieferung. XXIV, edited by Hanns-Werner Heister and Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer. Munich: Edition text+kritik. ISBN 3-88377-414-6.
• Reimann, Aribert. 1979. "Junge Avantgarde. Sieben junge Komponisten geben Auskunft uber ihren Standort". Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140, no. 1:5–24.
• Schibli, Sigfrid. 1988. "'...die sinnliche Qualität von Musik hinüberretten': Der Komponist Hans-Jürgen von Bose und seine neuesten Werke". Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 149, nos. 7–8:30–39.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hans-Jürgen von Bose.

• Official website
• MIZ-entry
• brief biography (Schott)
• Short Biography and worklist (Ricordi)
• brief biography (copy-us) works and how to download
• discussion with Hans-Jürgen von Bose and Siegfried Mauser (among others) in the Bavarian Broadcasting
• "New Subjectivity" in the 70s: from Bose, Trojahn, Rihm
• description of the Kafka Project 12/14