He started piano lessons at the age of five and later taught himself to play the trumpet and, at high school, the guitar. He earned School Music Diplomas I and 11 at the Academy for School and Church Music in Lucerne, and also attended the Jazz School in Berne. Ammann spent 1986 as a freelance musician in Berlin, taking part above all in projects involving improvised music. From 1988 to 1992 he studied theory and composition at the Basel Music Academy (Roland Moser, Detlev Muller- Siemens among others) and attended courses with Witold Lutoslawski, Dieter Schnebel, Niccolo Castiglioni and Wolfgang Rihm. Having already participated in numerous projects in the fields of jazz, rock and improvised music as a trumpeter, pianist, bass player, arranger and composer, Dieter Ammann took up composing at the age of twenty-eight. As it assumed an increasingly central role in his multifarious musical activities, he began liberating himself from serial techniques in individual works (,,Developments" for two trumpets, horn, trombone, tuba 1993) and subsequently arrived at a freer, more intuitive approach. Ammann has received several encouragement prizes and grants. He has also won international awards: top prize at the International Competition for Composers (in honor of Luciano Berio) of the IBLA Foundation New York; first prize at the Symposium NRW für Neue Musik; Young Composers in Europa Leipzig (first prize); and the Franz Liszt Grant of the Weimar 1999 Kulturstadt Europas GmbH, in cooperation with the academy of music.