Gerhard Stäbler was born in 1949 in the southern German town of Wilhelmsdorf, near Ravensburg. He studied composition (with Nicolaus A. Huber) and organ (with Gerd Zacher) in Detmold and Essen. He has been the recipient of numerous prizes, commissions, and grants, beginning with the Cornelius Cardew Memorial Prize in 1982. He has always been active not only as a composer, but as an organizer and political activist as well. He was a founder of the new music festivals called “Aktive Musik” and in 1995 was artistic director of the World Music Festival of the International Foundation for New Music in Germany’s Ruhr district. Stäbler is equally devoted to his work as a teacher. He has worked with young musicians from many countries in workshops and seminars for composition and improvisation. He has been a composer in residence or guest professor in North and South America, the Middle East, the Far East, and Australia. Stäbler’s compositional interests are wide-ranging, but they all share his continuing attempt to express a social, or rather humanitarian, position and message. 

An essential characteristic of Gerhard Stäbler’s work is its integrative nature: he seeks to bring together very different structural concepts (ranging from strictly formed, quasi-serial structures to improvisation) on the one hand with appropriately varied performance forms (from the concert stage to theatrical performances) on the other. His choice of compositional material is site-specific, so to speak. That is to say, the artistic message of each project is always paramount. This often leads him to move beyond traditional concert conventions and bring elements into his compositions that break out of the “normal” performance situation (as well as the average audience’s expectations): elements such as gestures or (dance) movement, light direction, or even the use of olfactory elements. His goal is always to stimulate the listener’s senses and fantasy, to awaken them to new and unexpected possibilities of perception and thinking.  
Further information: www.gerhard-staebler.de