CJ Replay: Jazz in Zimmermann

(An excerpt from the Choral Journal article, Pluralism in the Works of Heinz Werner Zimmermann by Z. Randall Stroope.)

 

       More than any other German composer, Heinz Werner Zimmermann (b. 1930) has incorporated jazz and American spiritual elements into European traditional compositional techniques.  For Zimmermann, this fusion of jazz and traditional (or “classical”) elements represents a key ingredient in the revitalization of Church music and, for that matter, contemporary music as a whole. According to Zimmerman: I believe, that this [the jazz idiom] is the real international folklore of our twentieth century and that a “serious” composer has the assignment to deal with it productively, adding its influence to the inherited, European body of traditional compositional techniques. His assignment cannot be to invent arbitrary novel techniques to his liking or to exclude any other older techniques from his music.

       Those who have heard or conducted works by Heinz Werner Zimmermann will readily agree that his music strongly reflects the influence of jazz and American spirituals. However, a closer look at his music, particularly his late works, reveals a complexity that goes far beyond the integration of a few “jazzy” techniques. Zimmermann has translated his philosophical views of man and his challenges in a twentieth century world into a “pluralistic” approach to composition.