Ensemble Phœnix Basel

“Stubete am See”

Right on the shores of Lake Zurich, the “Stubete am See” festival will celebrate its 10th edition from August 21–23, 2026, at the Tonhalle Zurich. This is where New Swiss Folk Music comes to life: In 22 concerts, 27 ensembles from all over Switzerland and neighboring countries will reinterpret traditional sounds, giving rise to innovative, modern music. Numerous premieres, never-before-heard combinations, and new compositions make every “Stubete am See” a unique experience. A rich supporting program featuring yodeling and dance classes, children’s activities, spontaneous dance music with our “Störmusizierende” (impromptu musicians), and culinary offerings complements the festival’s concert program.

August 23, 2026, 1:00 p.m.:

“Ensemble Phoenix Basel & Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet”

The use of signal horns has been a living tradition in many mountainous regions of Asia and Europe for centuries. Today, this is reason enough for cultural cross-connections. In her work, Singaporean composer Joey Tan combines the traditional alphorn with a contemporary music ensemble. The result is a dialogue that simultaneously explores sonic origins and new perspectives. In Jaggi’s work, the alphorn is stripped of specific local influences; the horns are treated as archaic, primordial instruments. Building on the foundation of the horns, a five-part sonic topography emerges, which the ensemble takes up and places in ever-changing, expanding contexts. The two new works are embedded within a framework of three short blocks of traditional music for alphorn quartet.

Program:

– Traditional alphorn music

– Joey Tan (*1997, Singapore):
“our children are coming, and they are not afraid” for Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet and ensemble (2025/2026)

– Traditional alphorn music

– Martin Jaggi (*1978, Switzerland):
“Fichten” [spruce trees] for Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet and ensemble (2026)

– Traditional alphorn music

Program

Musiksommer am Zürichsee

Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil

“The Absolute is the Whole.” This quote by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel comes to life at the Kunst(Zeug)Haus. We combine an exhibition, a concert, a spatial experience, and meditation into a single event. Morton Feldman’s “For Philip Guston” is a world unto itself, of unprecedented dimensions. In this work, motifs repeat and gradually transform, much like the changing light throughout the day. We begin at 1:00 p.m. and stay until 6:00 p.m. You choose when and for how long you’d like to stop by. You can listen, meditate, visit the IG Halle exhibition, move about freely, and decide for yourself how much of Feldman, modern art, and shifting perspectives appeals to you. A unique experience.

Philip Guston was a painter from the movement of “abstract expressionism”, which condensed on New York in the 1950s and 1960s – as a circle of artists, literary figures and musicians. Feldman – as well a member of this circle – once credited the painter friend with opening his eyes to sound as a direct, malleable medium, thus freeing him as a composer in the first place. Especially in the 1980s, Feldman made it a habit to write large dedication pieces for various artists, including “For Philip Guston,” written in 1984 for flute, piano and percussion. The source material of the commemorative piece, which lasts a good four and a half hours, is the sequence of notes in the name of John Cage, who introduced Feldman to Philip Guston in 1950. Guston commissioned Morton Feldman to speak the “Kaddish” prayer at his grave – after the two of them had not spoken to each other for the last eight years of Guston’s life. Feldman later stated that his own aesthetic fanaticism had been the cause of this break – and that he wanted the piece to follow the turn Guston had taken: to “stop asking questions.”

André Fatton

Morton Feldman, son of a Ukrainian immigrant family, was born in New York on January 12, 1926. In 1941 he began his studies with Wallingford Riegger and Stefan Wolpe. In 1949 Feldman met John Cage, which turned out to be one of the most inspiring encounters of his musical career. The result was an important artistic association in New York clearly critical concerning  the American music of 1950s. Other friends and exponents of the New York artistic scene of the time were composers Earle Brown and Christian Wolff, painters Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, and pianist David Tudor. The painters influenced Feldman to find his own sound world, a sound world that was more immediate and physical than ever before. From this followed his experiments with graphic notation. However, since this kind of notation led too close to improvisation for Feldman’s taste, he was not satisfied with results. Therefore, he distanced himself from graphic notation again in the second half of the 1950s. In 1973 Feldman was appointed “Edgar Varèse professor” by the “University of New York” at Buffalo, a position he kept until the end of his life. In June 1987 Morton Feldman married the composer Barbara Monk. On September 3rd in 1987, he died at his home in Buffalo at the age of 61.

“For Philip Guston”

In the early 1980s, the late period of his compositional work, Feldman continued to engage in the process of “fusing materials.” His musical language is characterized by rhythmic “patterns” or melodic gestures that change slightly within recurring cycles. These melodic gestures or chords are often enclosed by silence (pauses in musical notation). Such moments of silence are part of the whole pattern or cycle. Feldman created large blocks of consciousness – an awareness of the moment, a memory of structures or of the state of being different or otherness, and consequently a “narrative style.” Feldman achieves a consistent style by setting certain parameters for all later pieces: for example, the tempo is usually quarters equal to 63 – 66 per minute, and the dynamics range from ppp to ppppp. The consistency extends into the graphic realm: each line of his scores is divided into 9 measures of equal length, regardless of the changing meter. From this period on he usually wrote chamber music works with a playing time of 45 to 60 minutes, even four- to five-hour pieces, such as “String Quartet II” (1983) or “For Philip Guston” (1984). He wrote a total of 9 works longer than 70 minutes.

Morton Feldman’s special polymetrics are another challenge for performers . He even applies this technique in orchestral works and in his opera “Neither” (1977). This method of composition is even more complicated by Feldman’s preference, beginning in the late 1970s – influenced by Anatolian carpet patterns – for a grid notation in which all measures are graphically the same length – regardless of the temporal duration of the measures. This results in a “non-simultaneity” of the notation, similar to that already found in the “Durations” pieces (1960/61), in which only the first sound begins simultaneously, but thereafter each instrument plays its own tempo. Feldman took the polymetric principle to the extreme in the trio “For Philip Guston”. The difficulty lies in the fact that the three instruments play for up to 9 bars with individual time changes, but afterwards they have to land in a coordinated way, because the polymetric passages of the 3 instruments always have in total exactly the same length.

In my new edition of the piece, I have tried to develop a notation that on the one hand facilitates the interplay of the instruments, and on the other hand leaves the polymetrics as Feldman composed them. In other words: each instrumentalist plays his part independently of the two other players, but can follow where the other two instruments are at any given moment. This means: three different playing scores have to be played: each with the corresponding meter of the three instruments.

Jürg Henneberger

Program

Julia Hülsmann is one of the most distinctive voices in European jazz. Her piano playing combines clarity and depth, lightness and resonance. As part of a carte blanche project for the Ensemble Phoenix Basel, she is developing new music that bridges the gap between improvised jazz and contemporary classical music. Together with the ensemble, she is exploring new sonic territory: improvisation, open forms, and floating soundscapes meet the possibilities of an extraordinary ensemble – an inspiring challenge for the composer.

Program

The work “UR” for five instruments and live electronics by Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg is the chamber music counterpart to the powerful orchestral work “Kraft” and combines the dense energy of Lindberg’s early work – inspired by punk rock and spectralism – with precisely controlled electronic sound manipulation. Rhythms, chord sequences, and harmonic processes were generated using mathematical calculations and the programming language “LeLisp.” The title “UR” refers both to the ancient Sumerian city of Ur and to the prefix commonly used in German and Swedish to denote something extreme, primordial, or primitive. Furthermore, the word “ur” means “clock” or “storm” in Swedish.

Drawing on Peter Maxwell Davies’ “Eight Songs for a Mad King” as an inspirational model for its compositional form, “over the threshold; right foot” by the Norwegian composer Tze Yeung Ho draws upon ancient Chinese poems about court ladies from various dynasties. Each text focuses on the relationship between a parrot and the person speaking to it, as owning a parrot is a symbol of courtly loneliness – since the bird would parrot back the thoughts directed at it.

The music of “Enigma” by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir is inspired by the concept of “in-between” and juxtaposes flow and fragmentation. Pulsating stasis – the “whole,” an expanding and contracting foundation – contrasts with fragmented elements – shadows of things that exist as part of the whole. Harmonies emerge and fade away or disintegrate in various ways, leaving traces of elements that project themselves through different textures and nuances and gradually take on a form of their own. Some return to the core, others remain separate. Throughout the piece, the perspective constantly shifts between the two – the foundation and the fragmented shadows – yet the focus always remains on their relationship – the “in-between.”

A program that seeks to break through the boundaries of “absolute new music” through musical-theatrical and electronic means.

Program

The title of this program, “Micropolyphony,” was coined by the Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti. The term describes a compositional technique in which a large number of voices (often 20 or more) are interwoven so densely and closely that the individual lines are no longer perceptible to the listener as melodies. In the case of a piano duo, the possibilities are naturally limited, but in the third movement, Ligeti manages – through the overlapping rapid thirty-second-note runs within the soundscape created by the sustain pedal – to create the illusion of a constantly expanding and changing “sound cluster” that, like a living organism, slowly expands, contracts, and becomes brighter or darker. The second movement is a resonant, humorous homage to the fathers of American minimalist music, Steve Reich and Terry Riley.

In his sextet “Satka,” French composer Christophe Bertrand employs repetitive, interlocking sound patterns and phase shifts that are strongly reminiscent of Steve Reich’s minimalist music and György Ligeti’s micropolyphony.

“The weak interaction plays an important role in the proton-proton reaction that converts hydrogen into helium in the sun. The energy released during this process is the basis of the solar radiation reaching the Earth.” (G. F. H.)
Typical of Georg Friedrich Haas, the piece explores the microtonal inner world of sounds and translates this invisible yet life-giving physical phenomenon into a highly sensitive, hypnotic tapestry of sound. The work was commissioned in 2024 by the Israeli “Meitar Ensemble” and premiered in 2025 under the direction of Pierre-André Valade at the “Ultraschall Berlin” festival.

The German violinist and composer Friedemann Treiber is our “concertmaster” and, like his former teacher Hansheinz Schneeberger, reveres the music of Alban Berg. His distinctive musical language is inspired by the music of the Second Viennese School and moves between dodecaphony, limited aleatoricism, and free tonality and atonality, always driven by a strong desire for emotional expression.

Program

In 1990, French composer Mark Andre experienced a moment of revelation when he came across a score by Helmut Lachenmann, who would later become his composition teacher. For it was here that Andre discovered music of an unvarnished, existential urgency, sparked by a practical exploration of performance practices – a search for forms of expression beyond standardized playing techniques. Tapping, breathing, striking, tearing, plucking – the vocabulary of these almost physical states of musical aggregation has since become a crucial key for Andre, not only to unlock entirely new sonic spaces. As a devout Christian, he seeks through his compositions to “musically observe and bring to life the tender, fragile, comforting breath of the Holy Spirit.” For Mark Andre, the catalyst for this immersion and exploration of spartanly arranged sound spaces – which often seem archaic in their mysterious richness of gesture – was reading the text “The Curtain Is Torn” by theologian Margareta Gruber. In it, she examines the passage in the Gospel of Mark in which the tearing of the temple curtain upon the death of Jesus Christ is interpreted as a symbol of both God’s presence and God’s absence.

Mark Andre now explores the previously hidden worlds of sound through each of the “risses,” infusing them with familiar and unsettlingly foreign constellations of sounds that, in their subtlety and tension, compel the listener to pay attention. Whether this might reveal the breath of the Holy Spirit remains a secondary consideration. (Guido Fischer)

The composer prefaces the cycle with the following biblical quotation:
“On the seventh day, God completed the work he had created, and he rested on the seventh day after he had finished all his work.
And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy; for on it God rested after he had completed all the work of creation.” (Gen 2:2–3)

Before “riss 2,” which is divided into the sections “riss I–XIV,” he includes a quote from the aforementioned theologian Prof. Dr. Margaretha Gruber, a nun of the Franciscan Sisters of Sießen (OSF):
“Jesus chooses the rift as the setting for his life. And it will tear him apart; the place of his death, stretched between heaven and earth on the cross, makes this visible.”

The work “iv 6” for solo trombone was commissioned by our trombonist Michael Büttler, who performed with the Ensemble Modern at the world premiere of the “riss” cycle. “iv” stands for “introverted” and represents a series of very intimate, fragile, and mysterious works for solo instruments and chamber ensembles.

Program

In this program, the Ensemble Phoenix Basel presents three works that, in different ways, explore friction, resistance, and vulnerability. Zara Ali, Laura Bowler, and Hannah Kendall create sonic spaces in which technological systems, physical experiences of pushing boundaries, and social tensions overlap. What unites these works is music that does not soothe but challenges. It deals with pressure and overwhelm, with exclusion and belonging, and with the question of how the past shapes our present.

Zara Ali’s “Isolation Forest” is inspired by an anomaly-detection algorithm. From dense microtonal sound fields, individual instruments emerge as deviations, detach themselves from the collective, and are reintegrated into it. This creates a soundscape that lies between mathematical order and organic movement, raising questions about belonging and isolation.

Hannah Kendall’s “Even Sweetness can scratch the throat” takes its title from a poem by Ocean Vuong and refers to the dual meaning of sugar: it represents sweet pleasure, yet is simultaneously linked to the painful history of colonialism and exploitation. Kendall translates this ambivalence into multi-layered music.

At the heart of the program is Laura Bowler as a composer and soloist with her work “fff.” Emotional states such as anger, frustration, and exhaustion give rise to a musical and physical experience that pushes the boundaries. The voice grows increasingly intense, the energy increasingly immediate, until the expression culminates in an existential cry. In doing so, Bowler transcends the boundaries between composition, performance, and music theater.

For Lars Mlekusch, who conducted the world premiere of “fff” in 2017 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, this performance also marks a personal reunion with one of Laura Bowler’s key works.

Together, the three works unfold a panorama of contemporary composition that makes technological, social, and historical interconnections audible, while coming across as both precise and immediate. (Lars Mlekusch)

Program

Collective composition is a definition still regarded today with some skepticism. Musical hierarchies encountered throughout the history of western music have turned musicians and composers into highly specialized entities, whose point of contact often gravitates on the materialisation of a score. In this collaboration, we propose a more horizontal approach, seeking to blur the traditional roles of musical agents – from performers and composers to audiences and all the participants in the process of creating and listening to a musical work. (Gustavo Costa)

To the untrained ear, every instrument has its own timbre. But what happens when you delve into the inner workings of an instrument?
Using contact microphones as well as microphones placed inside the instruments, Stanislas Pili makes the subtlest vibrations, resonances, and preparations audible and amplifies them in the concert hall. From the “microcosm” of sound emerges a musical “macrocosm” that offers the audience a new perspective on the Ensemble Phoenix Basel. (Stanislas Pili)

Program