Henning Lohner (born 17 July 1961) is a German-American composer and filmmaker. He is best known for his film scores written as a long-standing member of Hans Zimmer’s music cooperative Remote Control Productions.
Lohner has written scores to various international films, among them The Ring Two and Incident at Loch Ness. Additionally, he has authored documentaries and art films, and has gained international recognition as creator of the Active Images media art projects.
Background and education
Born to German emigrant parents, Henning Lohner was raised near Palo Alto, California, where his father Edgar Lohner taught Comparative Literature at Stanford University and his mother Marlene Lohner taught German Literature. Lohner has one brother, Peter, who is a lawyer turned writer-producer for film and television.
Lohner returned to Germany to study musicology, art history, and Romanic languages at Frankfurt University, from which he graduated as Master of Arts in 1987. In 1982, he took a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Jazz Improvisation with Gary Burton and Film Scoring with Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin. In 1985, Lohner was awarded a grant for music composition at the Centre Acanthes to study with Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who became his lifelong mentor.
Lohner became assistant to German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1984; Lohner was introduced to the visual media working on Stockhausen’s opera Licht at La Scala in Milan. Subsequently, he worked in France in 1989 as musical advisor and assistant director to Louis Malle on the film May Fools (1990). Apprenticeships on Steve Reich’s multi-media oratorio The Cave (1990) and with Giorgio Strehler on his theater project Goethes Faust I + II (1990–1992) followed. Due to his commitment to contemporary music and avant-garde filmmaking, Frank Zappa became aware of Lohner; subsequently, Lohner collaborated with him until Zappa’s death in 1993, initializing and co-producing Zappa’s last albums The Yellow Shark (1992) and Civilization Phaze III (1993). He paid homage to Zappa with the biographical art film Peefeeyatko (1991), to which Zappa himself contributed the original score.
Lohner lives and works in Los Angeles, New York City and Berlin. He is a Visiting Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland. Lohner is a member of the European Film Academy and the German Film Academy.
Film scoring
In 1996, Lohner began his career as film composer in Los Angeles at Hans Zimmer’s film score company Remote Control Productions. Lohner contributed music to Broken Arrow, The Thin Red Line, and Gladiator, and provided additional composing on The Ring and Spanglish, which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score.
To date, Lohner has scored over 40 feature films, covering a variety of genres ranging from comedies such as Werner Herzog’s Incident at Loch Ness (2004), children’s animation films like Laura's Star (2004), to horror movies such as Hellraiser: Deader (2005), and family entertainment like Turtle: The Incredible Journey (2009). Regarding his music for the drama Love Comes Lately (2007), which was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, Screen International wrote, “a pleasant score with befitting Central European echoes adds to the congeniality of the proceedings.“
Often regarded as a “Hollywood composer” in the German media, Lohner does on occasion work in his home country, having scored movies by Bernd Eichinger and Til Schweiger among others. Lohner’s score for the silent film classic The Hands of Orlac premiered at the Ghent opera house in Belgium during the International Film Festival Ghent of 2001.
Lohner's music to The Ring Two received two BMI Music Awards and was nominated for the International Film Music Critics Association Awards as Best Horror Score. The Hollywood Reporter praised Lohner’s score, commenting, "An atmosphere of foreboding is aided by moody, insistent music.“
In 2012, Lohner was commissioned to rearrange the theme tune of the oldest and most watched news program on German television, Tagesschau, which caused a stir in the German media; Lohner wrote new compositions for all newscasts of the German principal public television channel Das Erste. Premiering in 2014, Lohner’s compositions received unanimously positive reviews.