Contemporary Music

Since its foundation, Bärenreiter has taken a particular interest in publishing contemporary music and the promotion of its composers. In the early years, it was particularly composers who felt committed to a new kind of sacred music who were at the forefront, as with the singing movement and the associated rediscovery of early music and the organ movement. The most prominent exponent of this movement was Hugo Distler. Since the 1950s the spectrum has been extended to include the avant-garde so that from that time  onwards, works for all genres, forms and forces, from the contemporary solo work to opera, have been included in the Bärenreiter catalogue. Internationally-known composers of the 20th century published by Bärenreiter include Leoš Janácek, Bohuslav Martinu, Frank Martin, Willy Burkhard, Ernst Krenek, Winfried Zillig, Günter Bialas, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Klaus Huber, Giselher Klebe, Jean Barraqué, Rudolf Kelterborn, as well as Ulrich Stranz, Heinz Winbeck and Manfred Trojahn. In addition, the publishers regard the intensive promotion of young and promising composers and the professional marketing of their works to be a long-term commitment to the future. This group of Bärenreiter composers includes – and some of these are amongst the most renowned and distinctive of their generation –  Beat Furrer, Matthias Pintscher, Thomas Daniel Schlee, Dieter Ammann, Charlotte Seither, Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini, Vadim Karassikov, Miroslav Srnka and Philipp Maintz.