Albert Mayr

A composer, teacher and scholar, Albert Mayr is little known outside academic circles. His papers on the epistemology of time have had a larger circulation than his musical works. He has composed instrumental music, electronic music and mixed media. His installations have been presented in Italy, Germany and Canada. His music displays environmental concerns (acoustic ecology) and a fascination with the nature of time — the latter culminates in Hora Harmonica (1983), a piece that proposes an alternative form of measuring time.

Mayr (born 1943) studied composition in the music conservatories of Bolzano (his home town) and Florence and graduated from the latter in 1965 with a diploma in music and choral song. He made a summer trip to Darmstadt around that time, but he stayed clear of Stockhausen's influence. His music owes a lot more to Pietro Grossi and the early Italian electronic music experiments. From 1964 to 1969 he assisted Grossi in his Studo di Fonologia musicals di Firenze. In 1969 he moved to Canada for a school year's worth of fellowship and stayed three more as a lecturer at the Faculty of Music in McGill University (Montreal), getting involved with its young electronic music studio. He also collaborated with R. Murray Schafer's World Soundscape Project around the same time. Back in Florence in 1973 he took a tenure as teacher of electronic music at the conservatory, a job he will keep until 1991. Active in the ‘70s and ‘80s as an installation artist, he has since been focusing on theoretical issues regarding speculative music and the aesthetics of time, presenting conferences in Europe and North-America. His music has been hard to find, but since the early 2000s the Italian label Ants is releasing his old works. ~ François Couture, Rovi