Nikolaus Brass

[1] After graduating from high school in 1968, he studied medicine in Munich, Scotland and at the Freie Universität Berlin.

He studied composition with Peter Kiesewetter in Munich, with Frank Michael Beyer at the Universität der Künste Berlin and with Helmut Lachenmann in Hanover.

There, he met Morton Feldman, who had a lasting influence on his further musical thinking and work.

The "concrete confrontation with the existential fragility of human existence, with departure and happiness, but also pain, infirmity and death, acted like a compass in the search for expression".

[1] Characteristic for his music were "flowing time processes, questions of order and disturbance, the [...] scanning of the outer acoustic surface for what it contains as echoes as well as aspects of human existence" in a "permanent circle of losing and finding again.