Music Encyclopedia

Febel, Reinhard

 

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Febel, Reinhard.
(b Metzingen, Baden-Württemberg, 3 July 1952). German composer. He studied composition, mathematics and musicology in Tübingen and Stuttgart, and from 1978 to 1982 studied composition with Klaus Huber in Freiburg. In 1979 he received a stipend from the Heinrich Strobel Foundation of SWF. After living in London (1983-8), he became professor of composition and music theory at the Hanover Hochschule für Musik und Theater (1989). In 1997 he was appointed professor of composition at the Salzburg Mozarteum. His honours include the Beethoven Prize of the city of Bonn (1980), a stipend from the Villa Massimo in Rome (1984), and composition prizes from the Boswil composition seminar and the Steinbrenner Foundation (Berlin).

Febel belongs to the generation of composers who were described at the end of the 1970s as neo-Romantics and representatives of ‘new simplicity’. He distinguished himself from his contemporaries and their seemingly casual adoption of traditional methods in his ‘lucid construction, his sensitive, brilliant yet reserved and cool sensuality, his technical precision and his alert practice of reflection’ (H. Lachenmann). These features are mirrored in his new postmodern philosophy of music. His works are intended to be heard as composed with tonal methods but not within tonality. Influenced by Zen Buddhism and modern physics, he conceptualizes his musical material in terms of alternating or overlapping relationships. His aesthetics have followed the transformational rules of an historical understanding that recognizes all events in music history as expressible in composition. Consequently, the concept of bricolage, which he discovered in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss, has become one of his fundamental aesthetic principles.
WORKS

(selective list)

Dramatic: Euridice (chbr op, H. Danninger, after O. Rinuccini), 1983, Munich, 1983 [after J. Peri]; Nacht mit Gästen (Musiktheater, Febel, after P. Weiss), 1987-8, Kiel, 1988; David und Gollert (Die Orchesterprobe) (dramatische Szene, P. Esterházy), B-Bar, orch, 1987, Freiburg, 1988 [after D. Cimarosa: Der Kapellmeister]; Der Zauberbaum (film score), 1987; Sekunden und Jahre des Caspar Hauser (op, 3, L. Hemleb), 1991-2, Dortmund, 1992; Morels Erfindung (op, Hemleb, after A.B. Casares), 1994, Darmstadt, 1994; Beauty (Hemleb), 1995-6, Hagen, 1996

Orch: Variations, 1980; Perc Conc.