Harald Banter (real name: Gerd von Wysocki) was born on March 16, 1930 in Berlin, the son of the artistic director of the Odeon Lindström record company, Georg von Wysocki. After training as a sound engineer at the Berlin radio station, he became music editor at Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln (WDR) in 1950, where he founded the Harald Banter Ensemble in 1951, which later became the WDR Media Band. In 1956 he played the first jazz concert with Albert Mangelsdorff in the Gürzenich in Cologne. Together with the Modern Jazz Quartet he performed the twelve-tone composition Twelve by Eleven by Gunther Schuller. For the ballet Marathona di danza by Hans Werner Henze for symphony orchestra and jazz band, Banter wrote the jazz parts in collaboration with Henze. As a composer, arranger and conductor he also worked with Hermann Scherchen and Bernd Alois Zimmermann during these years. Banter wrote numerous film scores for television.
Particularly worthy of mention among his compositions are his concert jazz Dream Mirror, the ballet Diana Sorpresa, the Fairy Tale Picture Suite, the piece Muse from Soundland, the symphonic overture Prolog 2000, Amores (Love Elegies) based on texts by Ovid, the rhapsodic concerto for cello and orchestra Phaedra, The Journey as a work for mixed choir and orchestra (based on texts by Baudelaire) and the opera The Blue Bird, as well as the choral cycles Heidebilder, Die Sterne, Elemente des Seins and others.
Harald Banter about his work Pulsare
"Of the 70 trillion stars in the cosmos, a pulsar has come into focus. A pulsar is a neutron star that forms from a gas giant of 1-2 solar masses after its material resources are exhausted due to a gravitational collapse in a massive supernova explosion. This process results in a dwarf star consisting exclusively of atomic nuclei, with a diameter of 10-20 km. In this transformation, the pulsar develops an unimaginable rotation speed of 0.001 seconds (in contrast, Earth takes 24 hours for one rotation) and emits lightning pulses into space that can be detected with radio telescopes. Externally, these processes unfold with the precision of a cosmic atomic clock. However, the internal polymetric physical mutations remain hidden from our observation. This remarkable state of existence also has an end. When the atomic nuclei's substance is fully consumed, the pulsar collapses into a black hole, disappearing into massless energy within the singularity. Up to this point, the pulsar's life is driven by the unwavering continuity of the cosmic metronome. As a gesture of gratitude and tribute, I dedicate my composition Pulsars to the memory of my friends and mentors, Hans Werner Henze and Bernd Alois Zimmermann."