Arnulf Herrmann was born in Germany in 1968. He studied piano with Arkadi Zenzipér in Dresden and with Gernot Sieber at the Richard Strauss Conservatory in Munich before going on to study composition and musicology with Wilfried Krätzschmar and Jorg Herchet in Dresden. He attended the Conservatoire de Paris (CNSMDP), where he studied with Gérard Grisey and Emmanuel Nunes, then returned to Germany, where he studied composition with Friedrich Goldmann and music theory with Gösta Neuwirth, Hartmut Fladt, and Jörg Mainka in Berlin. In 1999, he participated in Cursus (IRCAM’s composition and computer music course) and was awarded a DAAD artist fellowship. In 2000-2002, he studied composition with Hanspeter Kyburz at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin.

His compositions have been performed by major international ensembles including Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, and the Ensemble Intercontemporain at festivals around the world.

In 2004, he was awarded a fellowship for the first international composition seminar, hosted in cooperation with the Ensemble Modern and the Allianz Kulturstiftung; the following year he received a commission from the Ensemble Intercontemporain for their 2007-2008 season (Ircam-Ensemble Intercontemporain reading committee 2006).

In 2008, he was a resident at the Villa Massimo in Rome.

He taught composition at the Electronics Studio of the Technical University of Berlin (1998-1999) and at the Berlin University of the Arts (2000). In 2001, he gave a series of lectures on composition techniques in French music since 1970 at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 2004 to 2014 he taught composition, instrumentation, and analysis at the Hanns Eisler School of Music in Berlin and succeeded Theo Brandmüller as Professor of Composition at the HfM Saar University of Music in Saarbrücken in the spring of 2014.

He received the Hanns Eisler Composition Prize in 2001, the City of Stuttgart Composition Prize in 2003, and the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers prize for Terzenseele in 2006. In 2008, he won the Förderpreis Musik from the city of Berlin and in 2010 was awarded the Ernst von Siemens Prize.

Arnulf Herrmann’s scores are published by Peters.