Early life and composer career
Irmin Schmidt was born on 29 May 1937 in Berlin, Germany, to Kurt and Margot Schmidt. Schmidt's father was an architect and engineer, and both his parents played piano. His board school teacher of modern history had been a "Schulungsleiter" (teacher of ideology) in the Reichsarbeitsdienst during the rule of the Third Reich; when Schmidt wrote about this in his school newspaper, the teacher was fired.
Schmidt began his studies in music at the conservatorium in Dortmund, and expanded his education in conducting at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, studying under Heinz Dressel. Additionally, he took piano lessons from Detlef Kraus and studied composition under the Hungarian avant-garde composer György Ligeti. Schmidt started work mainly as a conductor and performed in concerts with the Bochum Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, and the Dortmund Ensemble for New Music that he founded in 1962. During this time, Schmidt conducted the West German premiere of John Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis" with Bochum Symphony Orchestra and performed Cage's piano piece "Winter Music".
Schmidt attended the Mozarteum University of Salzburg, Austria, to further develop his conducting skills under István Kertész. In 1964-1965, he attended the Cologne Courses for New Music at the Rheinische Musikschule [ de ] in Cologne, taught by Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur, and Earle Brown; the course was also attended by his future band-mates, Holger Schüring (later to change his surname to Czukay) and David C. Johnson. [4] By 1966 Schmidt got a position as Kapellmeister at the Theater Aachen, hired as docent for musical theatre and chanson, and worked at the Schauspielschule Bochum (drama school) teaching vocal technique.
In January 1966, Schmidt made his first visit to the United States, flying to New York City to compete in the "Dimitri Mitropoulos Conducting Competition". He immersed himself in the city's flourishing underground arts scene, watching Andy Warhol movies and spending time with several young progenitors of avant-garde and minimalist music, including La Monte Young, Dick Higgins, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley. Schmidt played piano in a session with Riley. Schmidt's spouse Hildegard introduced him to Russian-American composer Serge Tcherepnin, and Irmin played the saxophone part at the 1966 premiere of Tcherepnin's Morning After Piece. In 1967, Irmin performed several Fluxus-style diagrammatic scores, and published them as Album für Mogli, pet name for his spouse Hildegard. Album für Mogli has been organized as a set of thirteen-sheet manuscript, supposed to be stacked in any order by any number of musicians. The score's composition "Hexapussy" premiered in Frankfurt the same year, played on metallic sound-sculptures created by the Baschet Brothers. Other titles included" "Oiml(g): Nightmares", "Gagaku", "Für Jackson MacLow", "Erinnerung", "Dieter's Lullaby", "Nada", "Prinzipien", and other. "Hexapussy" was the only recording that survived, appearing on the soundtrack composed by Can for 1969 film Agilok & Blubbo.
On a number of occasions, Irmin was asked to give talks or perform avant-garde music at gallery openings organized by Albert Schulze-Vellinghausen [ de ]. Schulze-Vellinghausen, in turn, acquainted Schmidt with interior designer and up-in-coming gallerist Hans Mayer.
Can and film scores
In the autumn of 1967, Irmin wrote a letter to his friend, composer Holger Czukay, inviting him to Cologne and suggesting they should form a band. In 1968, in the midst of the West German student movement, Schmidt co-formed the Inner Space band (later known as Can) with Czukay, Michael Karoli, Jaki Liebezeit, and David C. Johnson. Schmidt took part in the band's concerts and recording sessions, playing keyboards, until the group's disbandment in 1979. He participated in the band's reunions in 1986, 1991, and 1999. He later commented on their relation to the political movement of 1968, saying the band wasn't involved in the movement, "physically or even theoretically, but was a reflection of the ongoing tumult that rejected any overt political affiliations".
Early in 1968, Irmin received a commission to provide music for 1969 film Agilok & Blubbo at the recommendation of Hans Wewerka who the worked as the film's producer and previously published Irmin's Album für Mogli score. Around May, Irmin had made a loose sketch of the soundtrack, aided by David C. Johnson, and eventually decided to invite his new band to play on the project, which became their's first released recording. When searching for a base for the new group, Irmin had "put the word out among his art world friends", and German literary scholar Hans Mayer responded, redirecting him to their joint acquaintance, art collector Christoph Vohwinkel [ de ]. Vohwinkel had recently leased a historic castle, Schloss Nörvenich, on the outskirts of Cologne and planned to repurpose it as an artistic commune. He invited the band to stay at the castle rent-free for a year.
Schmidt has scored more than forty films and television programs, including Knife in the Head (1978) and Palermo Shooting (2008). He has recorded a few solo albums and written an opera, Gormenghast , based on Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy . Gormenghast premiered at the Opernhaus Wuppertal in 1998. Excerpts from the work were released on Spoon Records in 1999. [14]
As of 2008, Schmidt lived in Southern France. His interests outside music include cooking. [15] In 2015, he received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Chevalier). [16] In 2018, Schmidt and British writer and editor Rob Young published a book on Can entitled All Gates Open: The Story of Can .
