Lorenz Maierhofer

Prof. Lorenz Maierhofer (born 1956) is one of the leading European composers focussing on choral works. He composes vocal and instrumental music, is arranger, editor, lecturer, jury member conductor and musician. In addition, he is a successful all-round artist – poet and also painter, illustrator and photographer. Lorenz Maierhofer lives as an independent artist in Kirchberg an der Raab, Styria, Austria.

Lorenz Maierhofer - the composer, arranger and editor

His big choral collections and songbooks, which have become standard works throughout the entire German-speaking area and beyond, and also his numerous choral compositions and arrangements, are characterized by his modern and timeless vision of singing. Several hundred of his publications, published by  HELBLING, numerous CDs and the many international performances, are evidence of his extensive creative work. The total number of published books and CDs amounts to several million.

1977 to 2002. After studying in Graz, Lorenz Maierhofer became a music educator, a teacher of English and Music and a lecturer for teachers training and in choral workshops. Alongside these educational activities, he has composed for ensembles and orchestras, he has played the violin in orchestras and the trumpet in jazz ensembles, in brass bands and chamber-music groups. He has also played violin, Styrian accordion and dulcimer in authentic alpine folk music-ensembles. As conductor and moderator, he performed with choirs on stage, he has led television live-broadcasts such as “WIR – SING MIT” ("WE – SING ALONG") in 1988. He has also produced radio broadcasts and was a recording director with the Austrian public broadcaster ORF.

In 2002 Lorenz Maierhofer ended all of his teaching and educational work and many of his other activities in order to devote himself from then on exclusively to his creative and artistic work. He has accomplished numerous international projects – in the form of both compositions and outstanding publications. Public performances and field research of music has taken him to many countries, and ethno and world music have become for him an important field of interest. Again and again, he has surprised the vocal scene with groundbreaking compositional projects and publications.

As an advocate of music “for humanity” – demanding, but at the same time readily accessible – Lorenz Maierhofer has, for decades, used his work to build bridges that are in keeping with the times. In compositional terms, his creative and artistic work is distinguished by its great diversity of style and content. His oeuvre ranges from contemporary choral compositions to instrumental pieces, from masses to oratorios, from songs for children to new folk songs, from ethno and world music to gospel, jazz, pop and chanson.

Alongside his composing, Lorenz Maierhofer also gives creative space to literary writing, and to drawing and painting. It is above all his individualistic linking of music, word and image, together with the dramaturgical and performative concepts underlying his books and projects, that mark him out as a modern all-round artist.

The Poet, Storyteller and Author

Lorenz Maierhofer’s German and English texts remain close to humanity and the times – in their content and language compact, profound and marked by a subtile humour. His literary writings, which he himself has often described as "music in language form", are characterized by rhythm and tone. His lyrical texts are rich in metaphors, rhetorical in structure, abstractive, and, now and then, they rhyme. His prose texts, too, are marked by a particular rhythm and melody. In readings, he often turns his texts into a vocal performance – for this, he also improvises with his violin, with his voice, with other instruments and with the voices of the audience.

His text repertoire ranges from poems and ballads to aphorisms and haiku, from prose and experimental texts to flash dramas and radio plays. In 2019, his short radio play “endzeittheater” (hassle around the end of days) was among the top nominations for both the TRACK 5 radio play prize of the "Austrian cultural broadcaster Ö1" and the "2019 Berlin Radio Play Festival".

A particular literary focus in 2021 is his cycle HIN.SEHN (Don’t Look Away) – human images in socio-aesthetic poetry. Whatever the type of convayance – reading text, radio play, scenic stage performance or art film – the subjects and characters in Lorenz Maierhofer’s texts impressively challenge his audience to socio-critical reflection.

The Illustrator, Painter and Photographer

In the work of Prof. Lorenz Maierhofer, the visual arts form a third level of expression. Again and again, he combines the three areas of music text and image in a congenial manner. For many years, his creative work centred on music and text. Building on the artistic activities of his younger years when, among other things, he was a student of the painter and media artist Wolfgang Temmel, he is now once again artistically giving creative space to drawing and painting.

In their content, his paintings and drawings take as their subjects’ aspects of humanity and of the times. They range from the narrative to the abstract, from the poetic to the caricature. Many of his images depict multi-layered images within images, they are human-political statements, socially critical outcries and cultural spurs to contemplation.

In his characteristic individualistic creative style, Lorenz Maierhofer brings to fruition poetic visual spaces that speak, whisper, lament, cry out and remain silent on various surfaces and materials. Using modern tools of “digital painting”, he makes his effortless artistic way along interesting 21st century paths of expression. His works are equally able to surprise in various forms of high-quality art prints (hallmarked and signed "fine-art prints", optionally NFT coded and limited originals).

Many of the artworks are an invitation to dialogue and reflection on their content. The works can unfurl their pictorial effect both in exhibitions and in large-scale projections and installations. In art films with content critical of the times, Lorenz Maierhofer combines his images with texts and music in the same way as he does in the illustration of his volumes of poetry – they are without fail artistically complete evocations.