The grandchildren were standing in front of the house with cake. The grandparents were standing on the balcony and pulling the cake up with a rope and basket. And because everything that happens to him that occupies him, washes up a text, more precisely: a text for a song, Winfried Huyer-May immediately thought of a line: “Hooray, hooray, the grandchildren are there with cake. ..” That is, he says, “like pressure, I can’t defend myself”.
Just who should sing the song, Huyer-May asked himself, who, as a father of five children and grandfather of 22 grandchildren between the ages of two months and 22 years, had never lacked interpreters of his works and musicians? It was the Corona year 2020, no vaccine on the market yet. Older people should limit their contacts to the bare minimum because of the risk of infection, and Winfried Huyer-May, born in 1941, did just that, and his wife Maria, born in 1947, very serious, as the cake on the rope shows. “And that’s when I discovered that computers can talk.” He typed in the text, the computer voice spoke/sang/sang, he built the orchestra and choir – and the song was finished. The first of this kind, he now has over 300 such computer spoken songs on his website allesopa.de uploaded. “All in all there are 1000 of my songs floating around.”
To explain that, the retired lawyer, two pairs of glasses dangling from a ribbon around his neck, his white fringe of hair freshly trimmed by the hairdresser, stretches far out during the conversation in the apartment in the rectory of St. Konrad in Neuaubing, on the first floor above the rectory office. “Our heavenly home,” his wife calls it. Winfried Huyer-May comes from a musical family, the grandfather a musician, the father a music teacher in Tegernsee, where the family settled after fleeing the Sudetenland. Of course, the young Winfried also learned an instrument, the piano. As a 16-year-old, he made songs for his sister, who was ten years younger than him. Two of them come to mind right away: “My Lassie’s name is Bimba” and “When I grow up, I want to be a lady”. And he founded a choir with classmates, the “Tegernsee Spirituals”, at a time when gospel choirs were far from common in Germany. The choir survived their time together in high school for quite a long time. Huyer-May proudly tells us that they had performances on BR, on US radio station AFN, on a Peter Frankenfeld television show and even one in Chartres Cathedral. The old gentlemen still meet every year – “although we don’t sing anymore,” Huyer-May smiles.
They used to record CDs: dad on the keyboard, the youngest with kitchen appliances
Nevertheless, it became clear to him: “I will not become a top musician”, the last bit of talent was missing. So he decided to study law and worked his entire professional life as an employment lawyer in a large company in the electronics industry, first in Berlin and then in Munich. But the grades have stubbornly held their ground alongside the paragraphs. Even as a member of the Catholic university community, he wrote hymns such as “Priest, make the church your/not a retirement home”. When his children were born one after the other, he wrote and composed “motley children’s songs” for them. One producer even put out several CDs with “Wini’s Rasselbande,” which featured dad on keyboards, eldest daughter singing, younger siblings rattling kitchen utensils. And whenever one of his children turned 18, he wrote an election song to motivate them to exercise their democratic rights. “I have a whole folder with nice letters of thanks for it, from Kohl, from Merkel,” he says.
In the meantime he has asked himself whether he should work as a lawyer in the music industry with his musical knowledge, his experience as a choir director and manager, and his contacts. And he decided: “I’m not the type for that. You have to be an ice-cold businessman.”
So Winfried Huyer-May stuck to what he likes, what he can do. Especially since he finds the music for small children today “too fast, too wild, too poppy”. He tried to inspire some of his grandchildren to slow down, to take things easy, to “Fox, you stole the goose” or “Little Hans”. Without much success – “they were gone immediately”.
And then Corona came, came the quarantine talk songs. “Mask – how around?” “We are the virus fright”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”Masks compulsory in class”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”People on a leash”. And his grandchildren also had to learn arithmetic, later they asked “Grandpa, do you know Latin?” Because, as I said, everything that concerns him ends up in songs, “allesopa.de” also has chapters on multiplication tables and Latin. The A declension for example. Winfried Huyer-May, with a roguish imagination, explains them using the word paprika. Of course, the computer voice seems as if the speaker had taken a light sleeping pill. Yes, well, Huyer-May concedes, “the computer simply can’t do it any better.” It just goes its own way when it comes to pronunciation and intonation. An understanding of harmony theory is all the more important when it comes to musical accompaniment.
Isn’t that bland canned music? “Yeah, I’ll throw it away right away.”
harmony theory. That’s the moment in the almost two-hour conversation when the 81-year-old has to ask in a very friendly way: “Do you know anything about music?” Well, honestly… Well then, high time to make it clear. To switch from the living room table to his small study, in which he spends hours every day – “many hours”, as his wife whispers to the visitor. It can be described with the word exuberant. A keyboard, no, a “workstation”. Laptops, screens, a converter. A piece of paper is stuck to a keyboard, reminding him to save regularly – “because everything often crashes here”. Speaker. Black, grey, purple, yellow cable balls. The recording studio is surrounded by collapsing shelves with books, folders, homemade dolls and all sorts of other knick-knacks.
Huyer-May launches his “Music Maker”. Pick a bass, in C major. Four bars, “we’ll copy them three more times now, then add some drums.” He is already rocking slightly in his chair to the computer sound. A guitar too, “nice”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”But now there has to be a different harmony, otherwise it’ll get boring.” And a voice, a hip hopper at best. “You see?” He beams, “You too could do all sorts of things with a program like this.” True, but: Isn’t that just bland canned music? He pauses for a few seconds and agrees: “Yes, this one. I’ll throw it away right away.” And immediately clicks on his most recent compositions. Titled with city names or first names, without text, so actually quite untypical for him. But a new challenge.
“Extreme things,” he reveals, he does in his wife’s parents’ house, a small farmhouse in Lower Franconia that the whole family loves. He’s got a three-string watering-can cello, a seven-string wheelbarrow bass, and all sorts of “clutters”—car springs, wrenches, crucibles, and pots. “Of course that doesn’t sound jubilant,” he says and smiles. “That even sounds pretty horrible so far.”
But he sounds very happy.