| Third son of Heinz F. Gehlhaar, test pilot, aeronautical
engineer and rocket scientist, and Gisela M. Bischoff, fine arts teacher,
was born on December 30,1943 in Breslau (Silesia, Germany). In
1953 his family emigrated to the USA, his father having been recruited
by the US Government.
He grew up in New Mexico and California, attending schools in Alamogordo and Santa Barbara. In 1961 he attended Yale University, studying science, philosophy and music, and in 1965 began graduate studies in music at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1967, having studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen who was that year a visiting Professor at the University of California, Davis, he was invited by him to become his private student and personal assistant in Cologne, Germany. Gehlhaar worked closely with Stockhausen over the next 4 years, participating actively in the development and elaboration of many of his important ideas and projects of that time. During these years he was able to study and discuss in detail with Stockhausen many of his previous work, as he had access to all his sketches and manuscripts, He also had the opportunity to direct rehearsals of a number of his important works, such as Kontakte, Mikrophonie, Prozession, Kurzwellen, Hymnen, Spiral and Stimmung. Furthermore, Gehlhaar also became the sixth member of the Stockhausen Ensemble a group of outstanding musicians who were highly influential on the European contemporary musical scene of the time, especially in the field of the live-electronics. Among them were, of course, Stockhausen, Aloys Kontarsky, Harald Boje, Alfred Ahlings and Johannes Fritsch. This ensemble toured Europe extensively and made numerous recordings for many different companies. In 1970 an enlarged version of this ensemble, directed by Gehlhaar, resided at the German Pavilion at EXPO '70 in OSAKA for six months, presenting a series of daily concerts of Stockhausen's instrumental and live electronic music. Upon his return to Cologne from Japan, Gehlhaar began to concentrate on composition and the performance of his own works. Together with his colleagues Johannes Fritsch and David Johnson, he founded the Feedback Studio, the Feedback Ensemble , specialising in the performance of the live electronic music of its members, and the Feedback Studio Verlag, Germany's first composer's publishing company. The Feedback Studio, a small private electronic music studio and development workshop specialising in live electronic music for performance, pioneered cybernetic musical installations and interactive musical environments. The Ensemble, touring extensively in Europe, concentrated on the performance of the instrumental and live electronic music of its members and their colleagues. During this time Gehlhaar also began to be regularly commissioned by a large variety of organisations to compose works for solo instruments, smaller ensembles and orchestra. In 1973, he was awarded the young composer's music prize by the state of Northrhein-Westfalia. Having acquired access in 1974 to a computer belonging to a friend who was an audio electronics engineer, Gehlhaar began to carry out research in the area of digital sound synthesis, automation of musical processes and computer-aided composition. This research work lead him to compose, for example, the 4-channel work for tape, 5 German Dances in the Electronic Studio of the WDR, Cologne. In this work, thanks to the studio's newly acquired analogue synthesiser and digital sequencer, he was able for the first time to leave a trace, in a musical context, of some of the ideas and techniques he was developing as control processes on the computer. For example, he developed the rather involved and complex real-time techniques for synthesising all the sounds of a quadraphonic piece to behave as if they were being emitted from objects in motion, with varying speeds, directions and orbits, sounding absolutely realistic and behaving according to the laws of physical acoustics. The physics of sound became a structural part of the musical process. This interest has always remained central to his musical invention, as is further evidenced by a highly original research project and resulting in the interactive work, realised in 1981 at IRCAM Step by Step.....music for ears in motion an acoustic analogue of a hologram, in which the positon and movement of the listener's ears determines his/her 'perspective' on a complex "three-dimensional" sound. As a result of numerous research and development projects in the field of computer-aided composition during 1976 - 1983, he began to concentrate on the development of ideas towards a special composition; it would be resident in a computer program, in the form algorithms, but 'performed' by people - non-musicians - moving around an empty space. These ideas led eventually in 1984 to the development of SOUND=SPACE the interactive musical environment, and a commission in 1985 from La Villette, the new French national museum of science, for the permanent installation of a SOUND=SPACE in the museum. During one of the early installations of SOUND=SPACE - at the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon - it became obvious to him that it was an ideal, empowering creative resource for the disabled. This led him to work torwards the development of new, more easily adaptable software and towards making the environment available to special needs groups. The first installation with the new software took place as a part of the Almeida Festival in London in 1989 in a series of workshops for 30 different special needs groups, mostly children. This series of workshops served as a benchmark for further appplications in the area of special needs, leading ultimately to the creation of two permanent SOUND=SPACE resources centres, one in London, at Musicworks, and the other in Edinburgh, at the Thistle Foundation, operated under the auspices of ARTLINK. SOUND=SPACE has become the major focus of Gehlhaar's compositional and performance activites, being employed not only as a creative musical resource for dancers, musicians, actors, etc., but also as an evolving technical control system for comprehensive, immersive environments involving projected video clips and images. Some important dates & activities 1970 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1986-87 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993-94 1995 1996 1997 1998 |
