During my therapeutic training, a fellow student said to me: „You always sing your own song, that is wonderful!“ I like this image as a description of my life, because it is true in a figurative sense as well as literally. I had the great fortune and privilege that I could – and was allowed to – go my own way from childhood.
Even as a small boy, I passionately loved repairing things — not because I had to, but because it fascinated me: a broken thing, a problem, and somewhere a solution that no one had found yet. Where professional craftsmen gave up, I found another way — not because I was better, but because I was more open-minded, and because I didn't give up. Because I didn't have a category in my head that said: this is how you do it, and only this way. This way of thinking has accompanied me throughout my entire life, through music, through cultures, through working on myself — and now also in my work as a life coach.
In my younger years, I took the composition entrance exam at five music academies — and failed everywhere. And this was the best thing that could have happened to me. Whoever doesn't enter a system, isn't shaped by any system. I was free: free to learn wherever there was something to learn. Free to think differently about things. Free to develop my own, completely independent musical language – and free to even become extremely successful with it. And ultimately free, simply to be there. And also free, to be there for others.
Growing up with Alpine folk music, the zither was my first instrument. Early on, I then discovered my passion for the music of the early 20th century — Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen. This tension between contemporary composition and folk music never let me go, and from it emerged a style that didn't fit into any common category.
I first studied various subjects in Munich, Freiburg, and Berlin — Musicology, Sociology, Music Theory. In 1993, a DAAD scholarship then led me to Shanghai to study the classical Chinese zither Guqin, with Gong Yi, one of China's most important Guqin masters. What I learned there fundamentally changed my understanding of music. The essence of Chinese music lies in the line, in the movement from one note to the next. The essence of Western music lies in harmony, in structure, in dramaturgy. Since then, my work has been to bring these two ways of thinking into dialogue with each other — without sacrificing one for the other.
In Shanghai in 1993, I met the Mongolian singer Urna Chahar-Tugchi and began composing for her. We moved back to Germany, toured Europe, and recorded albums like Tal Nutag and Hödööd recorded.
At 30, I began to meditate.
At 35, I moved to China again, this time to Beijing, and met the singer Gong Linna. In 2010, the composition written for her then went 忐忑 (Tan Te) viral — a highly virtuosic piece that transfers vocal techniques of Chinese opera into a modern chamber music concept. Years of large concert halls, many television appearances and lectures, shows and interviews followed. I now became a significant pioneer of a new Chinese art music in China, and established myself under my Chinese name 老锣 (Lao Luo). Prof. Zhong Zilin from the Central Conservatory of Music Beijing wrote: „That Lao Luo, as a foreigner, has invested more thought into the future of Chinese music, that his compositions speak the soul of China more eloquently than those of his Chinese colleagues — that is a great achievement.“
What has occupied me for many years and continues to do so is the setting to music of classical Chinese poetry. I have set over a hundred poems to music — by Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, Qu Yuan, Su Shi, and others. What fascinates me about it is not the historical, but the living: that these many centuries-old texts carry something that still touches directly. And it seems as if I have a special gift for these musical settings. Wang Jiyan, musicologist at the Chinese Academy of Arts, once wrote: „His mastery of art song is extraordinarily high. This grasp of the essence of classical Chinese poetry leaves even many academic composers in the country ashamed.“ And Frank Kouwenhouven, President of the European Foundation for Chinese Music Research, formulated it thus: „Lao Luo ist der Schubert der modernen Welt — ein genialer Erfinder herzerwärmender Melodien und ein vollendeter Meister der Harmonie.“
My life in China was exciting and highly productive. I was famous, really famous – people on the street in China recognized me and spoke to me. But too much was the busy and the artificial, and not the artistic and natural, in demand in this world. And so, a few years ago, I consciously withdrew from this life again.
More and more, another process moved into the center for me. One that no longer led outwards. Intensive work on myself — deconditioning programs from the Osho context (Primal, AFH), a training in early childhood deconditioning. My transformation was fundamental and fundamentally changed my understanding of life and freedom. When I then began to work as a life coach myself, I developed my own orientation and my own system. My focus was on clarity — not in the sense of certainty, but in the sense of awareness. At its core is recognizing one's own conditioning, understanding where it comes from — and thereby gaining the ability to change it. Not liberation from oneself, but awareness of oneself.
Today I work as a freelance life coach — and am still active as a musician and composer.
Listening inwards and listening outwards.
Freedom from the system and curiosity about everything.
What I do as a life coach
I impart knowledge about the Path of Clarity and train my female clients on this path. This is done with means and exercises developed by me, based on various methods, including cognitive training, gestalt therapeutic approaches, breathing exercises, and body-energetic work. No promise of healing and no counseling. Rather, accompaniment on a path that everyone walks themselves.
A man for women?
Yes. And if our world were different, then this answer might also suffice.
And yes again. I understand why it is particularly difficult for women, to the masculine to trust.
Why then? Because I can – and I do not perceive this as my personal achievement, but as a privilege.
My Motivation:
I consider patriarchy to be the great primal evil in the development of humanity. Approximately 10,000 years ago, social structures slowly began to change. Father consciousness, possession through settledness, the beginning of the struggle for resources – and male human beings were still physically (purely on average) superior in strength to female human beings.
Something emerged. Not culpably by anyone. It happened. Not because men wanted to rule or were worse than women. It emerged because it happened that way, because it remained while other things disappeared. And now it is here, patriarchy – and above all, women and children suffer from it worldwide.
But we have a consciousness. Each of us, very individually, for ourselves, alone. Here we can – if we are willing – shape, grow, change. Slowly, because it's not a cake batter that you just have to stir. It is the greatest mystery. Our consciousness. It is also the only thing that remains for us – if we once embark on the path of clarity – in the end. And it is so infinitely more than we have dreamed of.