Born in Basel, he began to learn the piano and music theory when he was very young and while he was still at school had taken diplomas in piano teaching and piano performance. Between 1974 and 1981 he continued his education in Cologne, studying with Aloys Kontarsky (piano), Karlheinz Stockhausen and Henri Pousseur (composition) and Volker Wangenheim (conducting). In the early 1980s he worked in the electronic studio of the Conservatory in Cologne, at the same time studying at the Departments of German Philology and of Philosophy of the city’s University. As a pianist, he was particularly drawn to the music of Schumann, Liszt, Mussorgsky, Debussy and Schönberg. He gave first performances of works by such composers as Klarenz Barlow, Mauricio Kagel, Claude Vivier and Gérard Zinsstag. He remained in Cologne until 1989, but then moved to Riehen near Basel, where he died on 13 September 1993.
All his choral works and the majority of his orchestral compositions have been performed by the bbc Symphony Orchestra and bbc Singers. His music has been featured at the Almeida Festival, the Donaueschinger Musiktagen, the Venice Biennale and the iscm World Music Days. Ensemble InterContemporain has performed Delz’s works in Paris and at festivals in Lucerne and Zürich.

Selected works: Die Atmer der Lydia Op. 5 for orchestra (1979–80), Im Dschungel. Ehrung für Rousseau den Zöllner Op. 6 (1981–82), String Quartet Op. 7 (1982), Arbeitslieder Op. 8 for solo voices, choir, amplified piano and wind quintet (1983–84), Piano Concerto No. 1 Op. 9 (1984–85), Solde. Lecture d’aprŹs Lautréamont Op. 10 for solo voice, choir and percussion (1985–86), Two Nocturnes Op. 11 for piano and orchestra (1986), The Seasons Op. 12 for piano and small orchestra (1988–89), Joyce-Fantasie Op. 13 for soprano, choir, two pianos and harmonium (1990–91), Istanbul Op. 14 for piano, soprano, bass, choir and orchestra (1992–93).

Two Nocturnes
In June 1986 I saw in the Kunsthaus in Zurich the works of Markus Raetz, and I was fascinated by them. This artist takes as the subject of his work the faculty of vision itself, and plays games with viewers’ visualising habits.
In my works, such as the choral Solde, lecture d’aprŹs Lautréamont and
Two Nocturnes, I make a similar attempt to override the percipients’ aural habits and bring these habits to their conscious attention. Unusual combinations of familiar elements may lead to new aural experiences (John Cage: happy new years). A critical discourse with tradition has now become particularly important in view of the plurality of offers today. The title, Nocturnes, points, somewhat ironically, to this tendency.
The First Nocturne, Anton Webern’s last cigar, is a non-dramatic musical work, in spite of what might be suggested by the somewhat arrogant title. (Webern was mistakenly shot by a soldier from the American occupation forces in 1945, when he was trying to light a ‘black’ – also meaning ‘black-market’ – cigar in front of the house of his son-in-law Mattel).
I find references to Webern’s music in the significance of silence and in the degree of concentration, which can endow one sound with the power to produce a whole chain of associations. The instrumentation emphasises fragmentarity: the First Nocturne is basically a piano composition, the long chains of chords are sporadically ‘touched with water-colour’ by wind or string instruments, or by sparingly used percussion. In this way one obtains an impression comparable to
a drawing with single coloured spots. The chords are the splinters of tradition. The use of traditional harmonies in Debussy’s compositions can also be perceived in this way, for example in the piano preludes Canope and La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune.
In the Second Nocturne, Andante ritardando, short fragments of classical music collide with the typical manner of playing the so-called new music. In these historical gestures I am not concerned with returning to the use of classicism, romanticism or expressionism. The presence of caesuras ensures that distance is preserved, while the listener is forced into very abrupt changes in perception. Anyway, in these fragments I do not employ quotations, and the ‘stylistic exercises’ are my own compositions.
The development of electronic music brought with it in the 1950s and 1960s an expansion of new playing techniques and also new possibilities for the sounds created by the traditional instruments, for example, percussion effects on string instruments, multisounds on wind instruments, extreme position etc., which can also be found in many contemporary compositions, often in the form of a ‘cliché’. The reason why they are so aggressive in the Second Nocturne is to emphasise the contrast with the classical-romantic gestures and not allow them to combine thematically and dramatically.

Christoph Delz