Ensemble Phœnix Basel

Repetition, patterns and playing with them in time are fundamental pillars of human perception and communication and are therefore probably also the reason for the lasting success and popularity of the minimal music movement, which explicitly deals with this phenomenon.

Minimal music emerged as a reaction to the highly complex serial music of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Pierre Boulez, which developed from Arnold Schönberg’s twelve-tone technique. It mostly uses simple melodies and modal harmony. The focus is on rhythmic complexity as well as tonal colour variety.

The American composer Steve Reich is one of the founders of minimal music, which he has decisively influenced for over 50 years. His music is characterised by gradually changing rhythmic patterns, which also form the style of Balinese gamelan music.
Hypnotising repetitive sounds, innovative rhythms and harmonic structures in Steve Reich’s masterpiece “Double Sextet” explore the boundaries of space and time and inevitably cast a spell over all listeners.
In this work, created in 2007, two identical sextet formations face each other, each consisting of two woodwind instruments (flute and clarinet), two string instruments (violin and cello), two vibraphones and two pianos. The idea of a dialogue between a live instrument and a pre-produced sound source recorded with the same instrument and with similar musical material was already realised by Steve Reich in 1967 with “Violin Phase” and developed further in the course of his life in several works up to “Double Sextet”. In all of this group of works, there is the alternative possibility of replacing the tape with live instruments.

Until 2021, the American composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies composed exclusively solo and chamber music works whose interplay is coordinated by a time code. In 2021, the ‘Talea Ensemble’ commissioned an ensemble with the express wish to use a conductor instead of a stopwatch. Sarah Hennies writes about the creation of this composition:
“Clock Dies” was the first piece where I thought: Let’s see if I can make chamber music.
In “Clock Dies”, Sarah Hennies explores the individual perception of time and the relationship between sound and silence. Time as a non-linear concept between music, everyday noises, moments of silence, ‘contemplation’ and ‘listening to oneself’.

During a stay on the island of Itaparica in the Baía de Todos-os-Santos (Bay of All Saints) in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), the American composer and environmental activist Gabriella Smith was inspired by the sound of the sea during the tides (‘maré’ in Brazilian), the sound of the wind and birdsong. In “Maré”, she pours gentle waves and pulsating currents into musical form and creates a sensual and meaningful homage to the eternal recurrence of the sea and the beauty and inner power of the water that speaks from every note.
Her music is less influenced by the pulsating rhythms of minimalists such as Steve Reich or Philip Glass, and more by the soundscapes of Charlemagne Palestine or Phill Niblock.

An evening of minimal music in its purest form for the eyes, ears, mind and body!

Program

The important Polish composer Ryszard Gabryś is a professor at the Katowice Academy of Music and the University of Silesia in Cieszyn. As head of the Institute for Music Education, which he founded, he has supervised almost three hundred doctoral theses and artistic dissertations. He is also the author of numerous musicological and journalistic texts as well as music series for Polish radio and television.
In his new work “Leverkühns letzter Sprechgesang” for baritone and four instruments, which will be premiered in this programme, Gabryś refers to the charismatic character Adrian Leverkühn from Thomas Mann’s novel “Doctor Faustus”, a fictional biography of a composer inspired by contemporary artistic personalities such as Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. The title of the new work is another homage to Schoenberg, the inventor of “Sprechgesang”.

His son Aleksander Gabryś has been our double bass player since 2001 and has also been active as a composer for many years. We have commissioned him to compose a piece for the next season. He writes about his planned work:
“Rio, my Rio” is a journey in sound – a homage to the forces that feed my musical imagination. The double bass takes centre stage – my leviathan, my companion since my youth, unruly and familiar at the same time. It is also a thank you to my ensemble Phoenix Basel, with whom I have been associated for a quarter of a century and who invited me to write this opus.
Like little Mio in Astrid Lindgren’s 1954 story, this piece also leaves the familiar and enters another world – sonically carried by fusion reminiscences, microtonal scales and chamber music dialogues. For me, the figure of Mio is also inextricably linked with the as yet unperformed opera “Mio, my Mio” (1969–72) by Constantin Regamey (1907–1982) – the fascinating composer, linguistic genius and thinker with whom my father once studied composition.
In a cadenza that the double bass chews through like an inner cleansing, everything flows into a cosmic vibration – delicate, distorted, united. And finally there is the name Rio, the river that recently entered my life – alive, inspiring, pushing forward. May my piece sound like this: optimistic, full of movement and quiet hope. (Aleksander Gabryś – 2025)

The Iranian composer Arash Yazdani uses texts from Iranian poetry, Martin Luther and Lao Tzu in his work “Dispersion” for qanun and ensemble. These texts are sources of inspiration for the qanun player, who interprets them on his instrument. The soloist should meditate on these verses and apply their rhythm and linguistic melody to the musical lines. Some melodic figures are taken from the traditional repertoire of Iranian music (Radif). The term “dispersion” comes from physics and describes the dispersion of a wave which, when it hits a medium, splits into its components and thus into different phase velocities. The ensemble forms a continuous flow of melodic lines and harmonic structures of pulsating beats and combination tones.

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After the Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera experienced a financial fiasco with his second opera “Bomarzo” at its premiere in Washington, D.C. in 1967 (Argentina’s military leader at the time, Juan Carlos Onganía, censored the opera due to the libretto, which thematised torture, abuse, obsession, homosexuality and impotence), he decided to leave his home country. He settled in Geneva in 1971, where he married his second wife Aurora Nátola, an Argentinian concert cellist for whom he wrote several important works, including the “Serenata” op. 42. For this work, he chose three poems from Pablo Neruda’s “Love Poems”, which he set to music for the Puerto Rican bass-baritone Justino Díaz, who sang the male lead in his 1971 opera “Beatrix Cenci”. In his later works, Ginastera combined his dramatic style, which predominates in his three operas, with a lyricism that is particularly evident in his two late cello concertos.

In 2002, the concert organiser “Ciclo de musica contemporánea del Teatro San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina” commissioned seven local composers to write a work based on the composition 4’33” (1952) by John Cage, which celebrated its 50th anniversary this year. Erik Oña’s contribution was the 12-minute sextet “De la incomprención de un silencio” (A misunderstanding of a silence).
Erik Oña writes about its creation:
The piece was to be premièred in Buenos Aires. It was supposed to have something to do with 4’33” by John Cage. The different ways of interpreting the silence of this piece appealed to me at first. I soon remembered another silent event that had haunted me in the past and which I could hardly remember until then. In the 1980s, a seventeen-year-old girl was murdered in an Argentinian province, apparently by the son of a government official. For a long time, it looked as if the man’s lawyers were using his father’s powerful connections to help him evade justice. This was during the first democratic government that followed the military junta. Tired of the abuses and distrustful of power, people took to the streets to denounce injustice. The thousands of demonstrators did not carry signs, chant or shout slogans, they simply marched in complete silence. Silence, which in Spanish is often associated with consent, became a sign of strong resistance, it emphasised the presence of all these bodies that were resisting and made it impossible to ignore them.
From Cage’s piece we can take ideas or attitudes, not materials or musical quotations; with the exception of duration, which in this case would be the strictest quotation. Duration is not, as in traditional music, the point of arrival for the development of musical ideas, but the point of departure. 4’33” illustrates a general principle in Cage’s music: the principle of duration. If there is to be a structure, Cage thought, then a rhythmic structure. A rhythmic structure (or structure of duration) is inherently hospitable: it can be inhabited by sounds, noises and silence. Silence and sound have duration in common. (Erik Oña – 2002)

The programme is complemented by the sextet “Vertiges suspendus” (Suspended vertigo) by Chilean composer Matías Rosales, which was commissioned by the Ensemble Court-Circuit in 2023 and premiered in Boulogne-Billancourt in 2024.
Musicologist Michèle Tosi writes about this performance:
The horizon darkens and the instrumental virtuosity reaches a climax with “Vertiges suspendus” for flute, clarinet, string trio and piano, a work commissioned by Court-Circuit for the young Chilean composer Matías Fernández Rosales. The muscular way in which he explores the spectral field of frequencies that the resonant bass of the piano (Jean-Marie Cottet) unleashes with an energetic intensity is impressive. This music of transitions sets itself in motion again and again, creating moments of fervour through the magnificent multiphonic sounds of the bass clarinet (Pierre Dutrieu). The timbres merge into a powerful meta-instrument that carries the sound to saturation. (Michèle Tosi – 2024)

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The Swiss composer Caroline Charrière was a trained flautist (she studied with Aurèle Nicolet, among others) and choral conductor. Since the premiere of her work “Vox Aeterna” for narrator, female choir and orchestra in 1993, composing has become an increasingly important part of her life, and in 2000 she finally decided to give composition the most important place in her work. The sextet “Papillons de Lumière” was one of her last works before she died in 2018 after a long illness.

The Canadian composer Thierry Tidrow calls his “Four Elementary Fantasies” gallows humour scenes based on cataclysmic poems by Christian Morgenstern. The virtuoso duo “Die Flamme” (The flame) is tailor-made for soprano Sarah Maria Sun. The music theatre elements suit her and her duo partner, clarinettist Toshiko Sakakibara. With this duo, we will experience an “opera in miniature” that does absolute justice to the enigmatic texts by Munich poet Christian Morgenstern!

The Canadian composer Claude Vivier writes about “Lettura di Dante”:
“Lettura di Dante” based on texts from Dante’s “La divina commedia” was composed in Cologne in 1973/74 and is based on a melody with six cells of one, two or three notes, which are constantly repeated and slightly modified in the soprano. This melody and all its transpositions and mirrorings were then combined into a long twelve-part counterpoint, the parts of which are rhythmically articulated in augmentation and diminution. From this counterpoint, a ‘melody of tone colours’ emerges, which, shaped by six instruments, becomes a counter-song to the original melody.
“Lettura di Dante” is divided into six main sections and also contains a seventh section in which the original melody is treated as a four-part counterpoint. Each of these sections contains a solo and a group of one to six instruments. In addition, a cell of the “melody” is played in the course of each section in the tempo whole=15, the basic tempo of the entire piece.
This music is dedicated to Peter Eötvös, a musician from the Stockhausen group whom I got to know during my stay in Cologne, and tends towards a new sensibility that I have always perceived in the marginalised, the “bums” or “clochards” (in Montreal “robineaux”) since my birth. Also this beauty and purity that old people and children evoke in me, or this closeness to death that my father and mother always imposed on me. The vision of an unattainable world in a life in which money and power determine everything. A life full of loneliness.
It is above all these lonely people, which we all are, that I think about when I write. I no longer think of the “future” or the “past”, but of a kind of vanished present, a kind of intangible joy mixed with the sadness of a child who has lost his mother. (Claude Vivier – 1974)

The Hungarian composer Péter Eötvös writes about “Fermata”:
“Fermata” (2020/21) is a concerto for 15 musicians sitting/standing one and a half metres apart. They perform a kind of time report: of our Covid days and pandemic years, in which normal life suddenly stops, then continues somewhat chaotically and stops again with tragic events.
The social tensions that have been mounting for centuries seem to have lit the fuse at the moment. The question is: how long is the fuse and how quickly or slowly will it detonate the bomb?
Such thoughts swirl around in the composer’s head while he writes the notes and rather has the feeling that the notes are writing him. (Peter Eötvös – 2021)

Program

Coproduction HORNROH MODERN ALPHORN QUARTET & ENSEMBLE PHOENIX BASEL

The Bavarian-born German composer Georg Haider writes about his piece “Morpheus’ Atem” (breath of Morpheus):
My piece is entitled “Morpheus’ Atem”, 3 metamorphoses for 4 alphorns. Here is a rough outline of the concept of my composition:
As the subtitle says, there will be 3 movements that are similar to each other. In the first metamorphosis, all 4 players play on alphorns in F, so that even very close chords (quasi clusters) sound harmonious, as there are no beats due to the same tuning. In the second metamorphosis, 2 of the 4 players switch to alphorns in G flat, so that we have alphorns in both F and G flat. This results in sounds with beats, which makes it sound much more dissonant. In the last movement, the other two players also switch to alphorns in G flat, and we return to the harmonic sounds.
The idea behind this is that the first part is the state of nature before mankind. In the second part, man appears, who “subdues” nature like a tyrannical ruler (a brief nightmare in the long history of nature). The third part describes nature after mankind. It returns to a transformed state, but once again left to its own devices. (Georg Haider – 2009)

Enno Poppe has become one of the most frequently performed German composers and is also attracting worldwide attention as a conductor of new and recent pieces. As crazy and eccentric, as chaotic and at the same time organised as the finished structures of Poppe’s music may sound, they always show what they are made of: From a few threads or elements (quasi “motifs”) that are almost inconspicuous at first hearing. The listener’s attention is focussed on the tangible processes of transformation. The titles and sounds of his works are usually simple, direct and at the same time subtle. This is also the case with the composition “Stoff” for nine musicians. This perhaps refers to the textile structure of the threads that make up a fabric, but also to the “reading material”, because threads that appear and disappear again (musically-motively) are also a characteristic of the literary “nouveau roman”.

Joey Tan writes about her new work, which she will be writing for us:
“I don’t understand.” “What don’t you understand?” “It can’t be that the sounds – once they have been put into the world – disappear one day. But where are they when they are no longer with us?”
Yoko Tawada – “Opium for Ovid”

With the Ensemble Phoenix Basel (fl, ob, cl, hn, tpt, vl, va, vc, cb) + Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet (4 alphorns) I see 13 individual musical personalities.
In Ensemble Phoenix Basel, the impulses and preferences of the individual musicians are always incorporated, realised and, above all, appreciated. The musicians of Hornroh also have diverse musical backgrounds. They come from classical music, jazz and the wind orchestra scene and all have different musical approaches.
Despite the differences in their musical personalities, both ensembles achieve performances of the highest calibre, because what brings the musicians together is their mutual respect for each other and for different perspectives. In music, as in society, diversity of thought and preference is a strength – it enriches the group, the ensemble playing and the work.
That’s why I decided to create a musical situation of mutual appreciation. Just as a chef extracts the best from each ingredient, in my new piece I also want to point out the inherent characteristics of the musicians, their playing styles and their instruments, as well as their preferences and backgrounds.
Perhaps the biggest difference between the two ensembles is their modernisation. The alphorn (although played on modern alphorns) is a primitive instrument and can only play pitches of its overtone series, whereas the modern instruments of Ensemble Phoenix Basel have been modernised over the years. They are louder, stronger and can also play chromatically, their tone colours are polished and refined. But for everything we gain, we also lose something. What have we lost by polishing the instruments? The clear difference between the two ensembles calls this into question.
I will explore these questions through melody, single long tones and loops.
As a composer from Singapore, I learnt classical music (as well as English language, classical ballet, Catholicism…) like a mother tongue, yet the roots have always been missing. The first time I heard a live organ was when I was 23 years old and doing the Erasmus programme in the Netherlands. And the first time I heard a cowbell with a cow was in 2020 in Todtnau. (We don’t have free-range cows in Singapore…)
I am looking for the origins of sounds, how they were used in the beginning, how they communicated across time and space, and most importantly – how I hear and understand them, and how I want to communicate through these sounds. (Joey Tan – 2025)

This programme brings together three very different works that all revolve around transformation: in terms of sound, form or content. Whether through natural sound experiments, micro-structural processes or an intercultural approach to listening – each piece tells of how music not only represents change, but itself becomes a space for change.

Program

A programme about space, sound and artistic attitude – with four very different perspectives on composing today.

In “A space to exist”, a composition commissioned by Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Eleni Ralli places the accordion at the centre – not only musically, but also spatially. The instrument moves between three spatially distributed groups, searching for its own place. It is about listening in space, about proximity and distance, presence and absence – and about what it needs in order to exist.

Younghi Pagh-Paan’s work “Im Sternenlicht” (In the starlight) takes its starting point from an old Japanese poem about retreating from the world. In a poetic language of sound, the composer creates an answer to the question of where one flees to when the “misery of life” catches up with one in solitude. Her music is at once tender, determined and spiritual – a sound meditation between heaven and earth.

Klaus Lang understands music not as language or an expression of personal emotion, but as a free, acoustic object. His compositions refuse any instrumental function. Sound is not used, but explored – as pure, audible time. Music is created as a radical form of presence: quiet, concentrated, without a message – and precisely because of this it is touching.

With the “Clarinet Quintet No. 1”, Isang Yun enters a new phase in his work: more lyrical, clearer, more structured. The clarinet takes on the leading role – as the voice of change, inspired by the Chinese yang principle. Yun lets it wander through the musical space in search of an “infinite melody” – as a symbol of breath, liberation and spiritual expanse.

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