Peter Ablinger, born on 15 March 1959 in Schwanenstadt, Austria, studied graphic design in Linz from 1974 to 1976 and jazz piano at the University of Music and Performing Arts Graz from 1977 to 1979. From 1979 to 1982, he took private composition lessons with Gösta Neuwirth and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati.
‘I played jazz and painted. The decision was made when I realised that I had transferred everything I had learned in art to music. But just as I did with concepts before, I ran out of images. All that remained was sound, or something even more unreal than sound. For me, “sound” was not simply music in its temporal progression, but something that reveals itself in a moment. The temporal unfolding is more of a necessity, something inevitable.’
Ablinger has lived in Berlin since 1982, where he taught at the Kreuzberg Music School until 1990 and worked as a freelance composer. In 1988, he founded Ensemble Zwischentöne, consisting of amateurs and professionals, which he directed until 2007. Countless world premieres by composers such as Christian Wolff, Maria de Alvear, Antoine Beuger, Sven-Åke Johansson, Christina Kubisch, Alvin Lucier, Benedict Mason, Georg Nussbaumer, Pauline Oliveros and Akio Suzuki, who posed similar questions, tell their own story of new music.
Since 1992, Ablinger has repeatedly served as a visiting professor and lecturer at various universities, including Columbia University in New York City, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University. From 2012 to 2017, he was a research professor at the University of Huddersfield, and in 2019 he was a visiting professor at the Conservatoire in The Hague and the University of Leiden. In addition to his compositional work, he has initiated and directed numerous festivals, including Klangwerkstatt 1990-1992, Insel Musik 1997, Musik für Orte 1-3 1999, Für Christian, Nader und Pauline 2000, Musik für Hunde 2003, and Konzept (:Musik). Among other prizes and awards, he received the German Sound Art Prize in 2010, the Ad Libitum Composition Prize in 2011, and the Austrian Art Prize in 2020. In 2012, he was appointed a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts. In the same year, the Academy opened the Peter Ablinger Archive.
Peter Ablinger creates musical situations in which the listener’s perception is often under- or overchallenged in order to encourage them to sharpen their attention and perception of reality. His work is divided into several parallel cycles. In addition to a series of purely instrumental pieces for up to 25 players (Der Regen, das Glas, das Lachen, 1994), he has been working on a series of works entitled Weiss/weisslich since 1980. Since 2001, he has created multi-part series pieces (e.g. Voices and Piano) or multi-part networks, e.g. an installation, an electronic piece and an orchestral piece (Altar). The Stadtoper Graz and Landschaftsoper Ulrichsberg complexes have given rise to multi-layered organisms placing the listener at the centre, challenging the self-asserted experience of the world through the audible and inaudible.
As of October 2025