Born in Frankfurt am Main on 24 August 1910 and died in Bloomington, Indiana, on 30 April 2000, Bernhard Heiden was a German-American composer, conductor and teacher. After graduating from the Berlin Musikhochschule in 1933 he emigrated to the USA in 1935, taught in Detroit and worked there as a conductor and arranger. After a master’s degree in musicology at Cornell University he took up a professorship at Indiana University Bloomington in 1946 and the chair of the composition department, which he held until 1974. Heiden’s works were widely performed by orchestras, chamber ensembles and soloists; in 1966 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and helped to establish what became the Historical Performance Institute at Indiana University.
Bernhard Heiden
Composer / Conductor
