Heinrich Gattermeyer

Heinrich Gattermeyer studied at the Vienna Academy of Music from 1945 to 1950: piano with Bruno Seidlhofer, choral conducting with Ferdinand Grossmann, composition with Alfred Uhl, and German literature at the university alongside. He came from Sierning in Upper Austria and had finished school in Linz. Teaching occupied him for decades — Viennese secondary schools first, the Academy later. His catalogue runs from orchestral and chamber works to songs, choruses and music for young players. He conducted the Wiener Schubertbund, and presided in turn over the Austrian Society for Contemporary Music, the collecting society AKM and the Austrian Composers Association. He died in 2018. He was born in 1923, the son of the poet Karl Gattermeyer, finished the Linz gymnasium in 1941 and took a Vienna University degree in German in 1949; the academy post followed in 1964. The Wiener Schubertbund was his from 1960 to 1973, and the presidencies ran in sequence: the Austrian Society for Contemporary Music from 1973 to 1984, AKM from 1984 to 1990, the composers association from 1992 to 2001, and the musicians' society of St Stephen's Cathedral. His writing stayed largely tonal, with twelve-note method used sparingly in the piano cycle Ludus multiplex of 1961 and the orchestral Bruckner Epitaph of 1996.