Helmut Kirchmeyer

After grammar school, he studied musicology, German literature and philosophy at the University of Cologne, where he presented what is probably the first thesis in Germany on a living composer, Igor Stravinsky, in 1954.

Starting in 1947 he attended classes at the Robert-Schumann-Institut in Düsseldorf (whose director he became in 1972), Franzpeter Goebels (piano) and Jürg Baur (composition) were among his teachers, later Bernd Alois Zimmermann introduced him to instrumentation.

[4][5] During his time at the Robert Schumann Hochschule, the Partika-Saal for orchestra rehearsals and chamber concerts was built there, which was awarded the title "exemplary artistic building".

[11] Kirchmeyer's studies are strongly influenced by bibliographical, legal and philological approaches, and by the thoughts of music ethnographer Marius Schneider [de], Kant and Jaspers.

For the first time in German musicology, Kirchmeyer used newspapers and journals as sources for establishing what he calls "Situationsgeschichte", a mosaic picture of the past by combining contemporary evaluations of minute events with almost criminological assessment of their relative reliability.