HK Gruber

Heinz Karl 'Nali' Gruber (he professionally uses the form HK Gruber) is an Austrian composer, conductor, bass player and singer, born in Vienna on 3 January 1943 and a leading figure of the so-called Third Viennese School.

Gruber is said to be a descendant (though the descent remains obscure) of Franz Xaver Gruber, composer of the carol Stille Nacht (Silent Night). From 1953 to 1957 Gruber was a member of the Vienna Boys Choir, acquiring his nickname 'Nali' (from his snoring, he believes). He studied at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, his composition teachers being Alfred Uhl, Erwin Ratz and Hanns Jelinek, and later Gottfried von Einem, with whom he also studied privately. In 1961 Gruber joined the ensemble die reihe as a double bass player, and became principal bass of the Vienna Tonkünstler Orchestra in 1963. In 1968, with his composer friends Kurt Schwertsik and Otto M. Zykan and the violinist Ernst Kovacic, he co-founded the 'MOB-art & tone-ART' ensemble, partly to perform their own repertoire (which included a short piece by Gruber, Bossa Nova, which rapidly became a hit tune) and partly that of Mauricio Kagel. The ensemble may be regarded as the cradle of what has been called the 'Third Viennese School', of which Gruber is now the best-known representative.

Like Schwertsik, Gruber had been taught in the post-Schoenbergian style of the Second Viennese School, but – also like Schwertsik – rapidly came to his own personal accommodation to tonality and older Viennese traditions. The critic Paul Driver has written of Gruber: ‘Neo-romantic, neo-tonal, neo-expressionistic, neo-Viennese: he isn’t any of those things, so much as a sentient (and downright accomplished) composer who keeps responding to whatever musical stimulus, be it highbrow or lowbrow, 12-tone or 7-tone, bitter or sweet, that comes his way’.

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