b Buenos Aires, 3 Jun 1926; d Murnau, 18 Feb 2011
Argentine-born German composer
Music for Brass Ensemble
- Brass Quintet No. 1, Opus 37 (1975)
- Brass Quintet No. 2, Opus 52 (1982)
- Partita
Biography
Carlos Enrique Veerhoff father, Heinrich Veerhoff, was German and the head of a company in Buenos Aires. His mother, Karla, was a violinist and the daughter of conductor Karl Panzner and singer Ida Panzner. In 1942 he became a student at the Musisches Gymnasium in Frankfurt am Main.
After a six-day stint as a soldier in World War II in which he was injured, Carlos Veerhoff continued his composition studies at the Universität der Künste Berlin with Hermann Grabner and later privately with Kurt Thomas and got piano lessons from Walter Gieseking. During an internment in Düsseldorf in 1946, he studied with Walter Braunfels (composition) and Günter Wand (conducting) at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln.
In 1947, Carlos Veerhoff moved to Argentina and taught music theory at the University of San Miguel de Tucumán at the Departemento Musical, which was newly founded by Ernst von Dohnányi. He also took conducting lessons from Hermann Scherchen in Buenos Aires during this period.
In 1950, Ferenc Fricsay was looking for a composition by an Argentine composer for an upcoming concert in Buenos Aires. From a selection of compositions, he chose the “Musica concertante for chamber orchestra” by Carlos Veerhoff and later conducted the world premiere. Fricsay offered him a position as an assistant to him, so Carlos Veerhoff followed Fricsay to Berlin. But from his point of view, the atmosphere in Germany was anti-artistic, and he returned to Argentina just a year later.
In the following decades, Carlos Veerhoff created dozens of compositions, nearly all of which were performed. In many cases, renowned and acclaimed musicians performed the world premieres of his works: Hans Rosbaud (“Mirages”), Ruggiero Ricci (Violin concerto No. 1), Bruno Maderna (“Cantos”), Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (“Gesänge auf dem Wege”), Ladislav Kupkovic (“Gesänge aus Samsara” and Symphony No. 4), Homero Francesch (Piano concerto No. 1), Gerhard Oppitz (Piano concerto No. 2), Thomas Zehetmair (Violin concerto No. 2) or Peter Sadlo (Percussion concerto No. 2).
Despite his success and the performances of his music, Carlos Veerhoff remained a musical outsider:
Carlos Veerhoff remained a composer in the German musical life who did not follow actual composition fashions. He called himself “clique-free” and paid this freedom with the fact that he was never offered a professorship and could not find a renowned publishing house for his compositions. Among the circle of influential German composers and critics he was never accepted as a real avant-gardist, because his advancement of the dodecaphony was unorthodox and beside all contemporary aspects always kept references to tradition.[1]
Due to his exclusion from the close music establishment in Germany, Carlos Veerhoff often went back to Argentina. Only from 1970 on did he permanently stay in Germany to his death. From 1988, he lived in Murnau, Bavaria, near Munich. His collection of papers is archived at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
extracted from wikipedia