Albert Loritz | Composers

Albert Loritz was born in 1953 in Rot near Laupheim (today: Burgrieden) in the Upper Swabian region. In 1972 he graduated from high school in St. Wendel (Saarland). From 1972 to 1978 he studied at the music academy and university in Freiburg (Breisgau): School music with a major in organ, music theory, composition and musicology.
Albert Loritz was a music teacher in his main profession, at a high school in Freiburg until 1995 and later at a high school in North Baden. Since his own school days he has been in close contact with wind music in all its forms. He was always interested in following the worldwide development of wind music. Through articles in specialist journals, at conductors' seminars and through personal advice, he tried to make a contribution to preventing the wind music culture from slipping into total commerce and so that wind music-making can maintain or create the position it deserves in public. Last but not least, his compositions and arrangements also serve this goal, which want to give the wind player a historically and technically well-founded performance literature based on classical models and free of cheap effects in carefully worked out instrumentation. And Loritz knew what it was like in practice: he played in wind ensembles, jazz ensembles and wind orchestras, for over 16 years he successfully led a large Freiburg wind orchestra, whose ups and downs and fluctuations between average performance and remarkable high level he was able to experience anew every week. .. And in the supervision of wind ensembles in schools, he was able to gain experience of how difficult and at the same time interesting it is to bring the demands for variable instrumentation options on the one hand and correct, appealing musical settings on the other hand to a common denominator. The desire to experiment was also one of the reasons that led to the formation of the ensembles "6 times different" (violin, cello, 2 horns, soprano and baritone saxophone) and "saxoforte" (saxophone quartet with changing "guests"). Together with his wife Annette Kutzer (violin, tenor saxophone) and fellow musicians, Albert Loritz (baritone saxophone, arrangements) worked out interesting programs with these groups, often with literary or cultural-historical references.