Swiss composer Dieter Ammann will be shaping the 2026/27 season as Creative Chair. How does he go about composing? How did he get into music in the first place? And which encounters marked a new beginning for him? A visit to his home.
No faffy greeting ritual, no formalities. Instead, we’re immediately drawn into Dieter Ammann’s daily life. The dog needs to be taken out again – would you prefer now or later? It might take a while, you see. We decide to leave it until later, as we’re actually already right in the thick of the conversation.
“Are the dark circles under my eyes really that bad?” asks Dieter Ammann as we stand in the stairwell, about to head upstairs. He’d been poring over a bar of the new score until 4.30 am. And there we are, standing in front of it: the grand piano in the attic is a well-populated workstation. All sorts of sheet music are scattered across it – printed, handwritten and blank staves. Amidst violin bows, a pencil, reading glasses and eraser shavings, he pulls out the score, which has grown further overnight and is maturing as the day goes on – even whilst we’re talking. ‘As you can see here, there’s no doubling of the parts; it really is a 35-part piece. This creates the blend that I love so much and that I’ve always loved in French music. Then you can no longer tell which instrument is blending with which other one. That’s probably what Boulez liked so much about my music, too.’
You can sense that the work continues in his mind, even as his body craves a coffee. And just as Dieter Ammann’s opening sentences are peppered with references, so too is his study: posters and programmes, dedications on photographs, in scores and books.
‘To Dieter Ammann. In memory of our meeting in Lucerne and his extraordinary string trio. With best wishes. Pierre Boulez”: He was presented with the book bearing this dedication in 2004. A few years later, the French grand master of avant-garde orchestral music wanted to include one of Ammann’s works in his programme, and so ‘Turn’ was created as the central section between ‘Core’ and ‘Boost’. ‘Your music is different,’ Boulez had said to him, ‘normally I’m presented with things that sound a bit like me. But I’m the one who does Boulez best.’ Dieter Ammann’s laughter reveals a touch of pride and a great deal of happiness at having been recognised at just the right moment.
Aware of how important it is to develop individual strengths, he has been teaching for many years. In a one-to-one setting, he can work intensively with his students. “I enjoy teaching because I’m good at empathising with other people and other musical languages. That enables me to help them simply find their way to themselves a little better.”
He uses exercises that encourage focus. For example, an exercise he adopted from Ligeti: write a piece for a string instrument in which only the note ‘A’ appears. “The idea is to fix one parameter, such as pitch. That way, you’re forced to work with what’s left. You’re faced with the question: how does the note come into being? Then you have to work on the note itself.”
Because a surprising number of students produce sounds, but not yet music: “For me, it’s important that there’s a focus. And ideally, the audience should be able to grasp that just by listening. Yet there really are people who sit hunched over their computers and don’t know what they’re composing. You could easily achieve the same result with a mediocre improvisation group. But composition is meant to determine in a much more nuanced way what happens when, and in what interdependence – whether sequentially or in conjunction with one another.” When Dieter Ammann draws a comparison with improvisation, it’s because he knows the field well himself. That’s where his own beginnings lie.
There isn’t, however, a specific starting point with music. It was always there – Dieter Ammann’s father wanted to study the piano, but had to follow the family tradition and attend ETH. Instead, he financed his studies by playing dance music: “He could hear something on the radio and play it back straight away. My brother and I probably got our good ear from him.”
That was also an advantage in my piano lessons – with Uncle Frank, a primary school teacher who was a friend of the family. ‘The problem was that I never really learnt to read music. I always played everything by ear. Uncle Frank would play something for me, and then I’d rush home and try to play it as well as I could.’ And practising was another matter altogether: “I was often ill-prepared, and Uncle Frank was almost falling asleep after an eight-hour day’s work. So I’d ask if we couldn’t just look at dinosaur books instead, because I wanted to be a palaeontologist anyway. We often did that too.”
Music wasn’t a career ambition, but something playful. “Just making music together with my dad on the piano and my brother – the three of us – that’s where I felt really at home. We moved from classical music to folk songs and then to tango.” First the recorder, then the melodica and guitar, and later, above all, the trumpet. “I wouldn’t have made a good classical performer,” says Ammann, but music never let him go.
The fact that Dieter Ammann took up composing was, like so much in life, a matter of chance: On the occasion of the grand 700th anniversary celebrations of the Swiss Confederation, known as ‘CH91’ for short, his former piano teacher from secondary school asked if he could write something for a quartet – flute, oboe, violin and piano. “I was still at university at the time; making music was my main source of income. And so I wrote a piece called ‘Vier nach zwölf’ – a hugely expanded harmonisation of a twelve-tone row.” He was “incredibly proud”, he says, laughing heartily as he recalls his youthful enthusiasm.
The series of coincidences continued: a painter friend of Dieter Ammann’s, Willy Müller-Brittnau, wanted some music from him for an exhibition. “But I couldn’t just turn up there every evening for a whole month to improvise.” Out of necessity, he composed something – an 8-minute piece for string orchestra. “So I took it to the recording studio of the band Krokus. They already had some good synthesisers, and we recorded the piece, section by section. Then we were able to play it on a continuous loop at the exhibition.” It was there that the pianist from the Ensemble für Neue Musik Zürich heard it, and several commissions followed.
Following these first commissions, it was a series of encounters that shaped his future path. “I wouldn’t be here with you at the Tonhalle today if it weren’t for these four people: Pierre Boulez, Wolfgang Rihm, George Benjamin and Unsuk Chin. I’m very grateful to them. Because I’m not the sort of person who can churn out two works every year.”
But he always had pieces to hand at just the right moments that really captivated the audience. Take 1997, for example, when Wolfgang Rihm was Composer-in-Residence at the Lucerne Festival. Dieter Ammann was already teaching at the time and said to his students: “‘A very famous contemporary composer is here today. Instead of writing yet another Bach chorale with parallel fifths, let’s go and see him.’ Rihm enquired about the guests and asked whether Ammann composed himself: ‘Why don’t you bring along something of your own tomorrow?” The next day, Ammann presented his saxophone concerto, “and Rihm was absolutely thrilled. By chance, the photographer Priska Ketterer was there and snapped a photo. That’s how the photo of the two of us came about.” It marked the start of an intense exchange with the late Wolfgang Rihm. Ammann estimates 14,000 emails, text messages and musical analyses, ranging from the risqué to the personal. “I miss him terribly.”
Dieter Ammann’s memories seem as vivid as if they’d only just happened. And he likes to surround himself with them. Be it the certificates of honorary citizenship from Zofingen in the stairwell, the measuring sticks that once documented the children’s growth, or holiday souvenirs. But right at the start, he makes one thing clear: “Being on the move isn’t really my thing. I prefer to be at home.”
That also – and above all – applies to composing. “I can really only compose there,” he says, pointing across the room to his grand piano. “It’s a journey into the unknown; everything falls into place in my head before I can write it down. I don’t need any further disruption in my surroundings.” There have been a few residencies that were explicitly intended for composing – and that’s what he did. But he doesn’t really enjoy doing it.
“I also need my chaos, which isn’t really chaos at all. And the glasses! I really only put these glasses on when I’m composing. It’s a process of concentration. When I put them on, it begins.”
And how does it begin? In fact, there is a pattern to his approach. “For me, it rarely comes out of nowhere – that used to happen a lot in New Music. I like it when you’re first stirred into action.” It all starts with an impulse. “It’s perhaps almost a formula. But then it always develops differently: one time I introduce a contrast; another time I compose an echo of that impulse. And in the third piece, it’s a condensed variation on the impulse, and so on.”
The end, on the other hand, he never really knows. “I’d even go so far as to say that’s the reason why I compose. It’s certainly not for the money. The meticulous self-questioning – is this good enough or not? That’s not it either. But the journey into the unknown – you’ve no idea where you’ll be with it in three or four months’ time, what potential it holds or, indeed, doesn’t hold: that’s what it’s all about.”
The only certainty in his study is the study itself – and by that he even means a physical certainty. Because when he moved in, the grand piano was hoisted in via the balcony using a crane. This has since had to be removed due to insulation work. Now the grand piano can’t be taken out. But there are worse prospects for Dieter Ammann.
