The Munich-based composer, who swam against the modernist tide of postwar music, has died at the age of eighty-nine. He received little notice outside Germany; I was touched to receive a note from him several years ago after I made a brief mention of his music. At the heart of his output are three remarkable symphonies, written in the years around 1970: "Fogli," "Ricordanze," and "Menschen-Los." Their spareness, their stillness, their extreme reticence, and their use of dissociated, free-floating tonal materials make them seem prophetic at times of compositions of the Wandelweiser school, although in the end Killmayer belongs to an Expressionist tradition, one that has been refined to the point of vanishing.
