Arnulf Herrmann was born in Heidelberg. He first studied piano in Munich, followed by composition and music theory in Dresden, Paris and Berlin. Herrmann works closely with some of the world’s leading ensembles for contemporary music (the Ensemble Modern, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Klangforum Wien and the MusikFabrik NRW) as well as various orchestras (such as the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the SWR Baden-Baden Freiburg Symphony Orchestra, the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne and the New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra). His pieces are played within Germany and abroad and have been performed at festivals such as the Donaueschingen, the Witten Festival for New Chamber Music, the Munich Biennale, the Wien Modern, Ultraschall Berlin, Eclat Stuttgart and Musica Straßbourg. His opera “Wasser” premiered in 2012 at the Munich Biennale performed by the Ensemble Modern. In 2017 his opera “Der Mieter” (“The Tenant”) was premiered at Oper Frankfurt. Herrmann has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Hanns Eisler Composition Prize (2001), the Stuttgart Composition Prize (2003) and the award presented by the International Rostrum of Composers (for Terzenseele, 2006). In 2008 he won the Berlin Art Prize and also spent a year as artist-in-residence at the Villa Massimo in Rome. In 2010 Herrmann received the Composer’s Prize from the Ernst von Siemens music foundation. From 2004 to 2014 he taught composition, instrumentation and analysis at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin and was appointed Professor of Composition at the HfM Saar University of Music in Saarbrücken in the spring of 2014. He lives in Berlin.
As of May 2020