Ernst Helmuth Flammer is a member of that generation of composers that gave so many striking, urgent and wide-ranging stimuli to the music of the 1970s and 1980s like P. M. Hamel, P. Ruzicka, M. Trojahn, W. Zimmermann, W. Rihm and others. What Flammer has in common with these composers is his effort to adopt post-1950 compositional innovations in a critical spirit and, at the same time, to extend them creatively. In other words, rather than mindlessly imitating or radically rejecting serial and post-serial music, his concern is to initiate a form of musical thoughts as beholden to the recent past as it is open to future developments. What makes Flammer unique in this group is, first of all, his relatively late decision to become a professional composer, and secondly, the firmness with which he has defined his compositional stance since that time. Complexity forms a sort of fingerprint for Flammer's music as a whole. And several items in Flammer's biography suggest a connection with this complexity (composition lessons with K. Huber, B. Ferneyhough and P. H. Dittrich; doctoral dissertation on H. W. Henze and L. Nono). He insists on the proximity of his music to spatial art - architecture - and his frequent reflections on music as a temporal art form.
