Lohner has written scores to various international films, among them The Ring Two and Incident at Loch Ness.[2][3][4] Additionally, he has authored documentaries and art films, and has gained international recognition as creator of the Active Images media art projects.[5]
Lohner returned to Germany to study musicology, art history, and Romanic languages at Frankfurt University, from which he graduated as Master of Arts in 1987.[7] In 1982, he took a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Jazz Improvisation with Gary Burton and Film Scoring with Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin.[8] In 1985, Lohner was awarded a grant for music composition at the Centre Acanthes to study with Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who became his lifelong mentor.[9]
Lohner became assistant to German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1984; Lohner was introduced to the visual media working on Stockhausen’s opera Licht at La Scala in Milan.[10][failed verification][11] Subsequently, he worked in France in 1989 as musical advisor and assistant director to Louis Malle on the film May Fools (1990).[7] Apprenticeships on Steve Reich’s multi-media oratorio The Cave (1990) and with Giorgio Strehler on his theater project Goethes Faust I + II (1990–1992) followed.[12] Due to his commitment to contemporary music and avant-garde filmmaking, Frank Zappa became aware of Lohner; subsequently, Lohner collaborated with him until Zappa’s death in 1993, initializing and co-producing Zappa’s last albums The Yellow Shark (1992) and Civilization Phaze III (1993).[13] He paid homage to Zappa with the biographical art film Peefeeyatko (1991), to which Zappa himself contributed the original score.[14]
In 2012, Lohner was commissioned to rearrange the theme tune of the oldest and most watched news program on German television, Tagesschau, which caused a stir in the German media;[31][32] Lohner wrote new compositions for all newscasts of the German principal public television channel Das Erste.[33] Premiering in 2014, Lohner’s compositions received unanimously positive reviews.[4][34]
Media art
Lohner’s collaboration with cinematographer Van Carlson started in 1989 with Peefeeyatko.[5][35] Their artistic partnership, known as Lohner Carlson, was influenced by their collaboration with composer John Cage, which includes the art film One11 and 103 (1992)[36][37] directed by Lohner, “a 90-minute black-and-white meditation on the waxing and waning of light.”[38]Gramophone magazine called the production “a splendid project carried out with dedication by all concerned” and noted the “remarkable quality of these uniquely pure visual images, studies in light ranging from total black to total white.”[39] Lohner paid homage to Cage posthumously with the “composed film” The Revenge of the Dead Indians,[40][41] featuring artists such as Dennis Hopper, Matt Groening and Yoko Ono.[42]
Lohner and Carlson exhibited their audio-visual composition Raw Material, Vol. 1–11 (1995)[43] throughout Europe, for instance in The Hague, Rome and Berlin.[44][45] Composed from their archive of hundreds of hours of footage, the installation was “a multi-facetted mosaic of films […] focussing on humanistic issues;”[46] it showed interviews as well as landscapes on eleven monitors, with an equal emphasis on speech, pictures and sounds “in a new, free form of presentation,” thus generating “a type of global talk.”[47] Subsequently, Lohner and Carlson’s Active Images developed, first shown at the Galerie Springer Berlin in 2006.[48] According to Lohner himself, the idea “arose from our love of video photography and from our subsequent despair over the loss of these images when turning them into [an edited] film.”[49] Presented on flat displays, the works bridge the recognizable gap between photography and narrative film and thus “blur the line between image and video.”[50]
German culture reviewer Detlef Wolff has called Lohner an “unceasingly curious artist capable of looking closely, continuously able to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.”[54] Of an exhibition at the Erik Thomsen Gallery in 2012, a review noted that Lohner and Carlson’s work combined “the best of moving images and photographic approaches. The images are shown on a series of high resolution video panels and provide a poetic and elegant glance at seemingly normal scenes. Yet they succeed in unframing our structured visual perception of reality and moving us out of that perception box, if we look closely enough embracing a meditative patience.”[55]
^Interview with Xenakis, Computer Music Journal 10, Nr.4 1986, p.48-53; Xenakis and the UPIC, Computer Music Journal 10, Nr.4 1986, p.42-47; Xenakis Werkliste und Auswahlbibliographie, MusikTexte 13, 1986, p.50-59.
^More Music with Media Ventures, in: Keyboard. The World’s Leading Music Technology Magazine, April 1999, p.33; Die Magie der Filmmusik, in: Keyboards, May 1999, p.31; Du 754 – Augen zu, Film ab. Ein Handbuch zum Soundtrack, March 2005, p.24.
^Interview with Henning Lohner, in: Keys 7, July 2002, p.100.
^Henning Lohner: The Making of Cage’s one11, in: Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art, David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch (Ed.), Chicago University Press 2001.
^World Wide Video Festival Catalogue (11/4 – 17/4 1994), Stichting World Wide Video Centre (Ed.), The Hague 1994, p. 101; Videofest 10.-20. Februar 1994 Mediopolis, Berlin e.V. (Ed.), p.91; Das Medienkunstfestival des ZKM Karlsruhe 1995, Katalog der Ausstellungen und Veranstaltungen, Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (Ed.), p.78.
^Wolff, Detlef: Die Welt als permanentes Bildermosaik – Henning Lohner zeigt im Lichthaus seine Videokomposition "raw material". Weser-Kurier, 26.6.1996, S. 21.
