Rolf Gehlhaar

Born on 30 December 1943 in Breslau; Rolf Gehlhaar was a German-American composer, sound artist and researcher. In 1953 he came to the United States with his family and took American citizenship in 1958; at Yale University and in Berkeley he first studied medicine, then philosophy, philosophy of science and music. In 1967 he went to Cologne, became an assistant to Karlheinz Stockhausen and a member of his ensemble, with which he appeared at the World Exposition in Osaka in 1970; in the same year he founded the Feedback Studio with Johannes Fritsch and David Johnson, and the publishing house followed in 1971. In 1974 and 1976 he taught at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, in 1979 he was among the founders of the British Electro-Acoustic Music Association, and from 1979 to 1981 he carried out research at IRCAM. From 1985 he developed the computer-controlled interactive installations “KLANG=RAUM” and from 1988 applied them systematically in movement and music therapy. In 2002 he became a lecturer in design and digital media at Coventry University and later professor of experimental music there; he was among the founders of the British Paraorchestra, of which he was the technical director. He died on 7 July 2019. Five albums connect him with Cybele, and nearly all belong to the series documenting the Feedback Studio Köln he helped to found: the sampler for its twenty-fifth anniversary (1996), DEGEM Vol. 6 (2003), where he plays the cymbal while Johannes Fritsch operates the faders, the 3 Trios (2006) on percussion, and the Live Electronic Music (2011), on which he is heard alongside Fritsch, Alfred Alings and Karlheinz Stockhausen. To these is added a contribution to the audiobook production Weht ein Stadtspaziergang durch den Traum (2014).