About
Thomas Kessler, born in 1937, is composer-in-residence of LUCERNE FESTIVAL this summer. After studying German and Romance languages in his hometown of Zurich and in Paris, he studied composition with Heinz Friedrich Harigig, Ernst Pepping and Boris Blacher in Berlin, where he subsequently directed the Elec-tronic Beat Studio and later moved to Nancy at the Center universitaire international de formation et de recherche dramatique.
From 1973 to 2000 he taught composition and music theory at the Music Academy Basel, where he built the electronic studio. Together with Gérard Zinsstag, he founded the Days for New Music in Zurich, with Wolfgang Heiniger he founded the "Echt! Zeit" festival for live electronic music in Basel. Kessler was honored in 2005 with the «Composition Prize Marguerite Staehelin» of the Swiss Tonkünstlerverein and in 2018 with the Swiss Music Prize and is a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts.