Ermano Maggini was born on 30 August 1931 in Intragna in Canton Ticino. He gained his first musical impressions at the Collegio Papio in Ascona. Ermano Maggini lived in Zürich for forty years; he studied at the city’s music academy, and later earned his living as a music teacher. As a co-founder of the Zürich Guitar School, he taught many full-time students, and right to the end he was active as a highly-regarded teacher of theory and instrumentation at various schools, especially at the Cantonal Grammar School in Wiedikon. His compositional oeuvre was written in just over two decades. With Maggini, Switzerland gained a musical, artistic, visionary oeuvre that has so far only partly come to the public’s attention. Maggini died on 19 December 1991 in the town of his birth, shortly after having created the Fondazione Ermano Maggini Intragna (Ermano Maggini Foundation of Intragna).