Ensemble Phœnix Basel

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

Heidelberger Frühling 2026

Music Festival «A Celebration of Wolfgang Rihm»

Vigilia – In Memoriam Wolfgang Rihm (13.3.1952–27.7.2024)

Concert with «SCHOLA HEIDELBERG» (Conductor: Ekkehard Windrich) and «Ensemble Phoenix Basel» (Conductor: Jürg Henneberger)

Wolfgang Rihm’s death in the summer of 2024 not only caused consternation and deep sadness in the music world, it also left an immense gap. The composer’s almost incomprehensible productivity, his simultaneously sensual and intellectually sharp approach to everything aesthetic and, last but not least, the sheer spiritual and physical presence of Rihm the man: all of this is now missing. Far and wide, there are no recognizable instances that could satisfy the longing for such forces.

As present as Rihm was in the cultural life of Germany and beyond for decades, he has now suddenly fallen silent. The Heidelberger Frühling, to which Wolfgang Rihm was closely associated over the decades – all of his string quartets were performed here as recently as January 2022 – is now honouring the master with a day of celebration: ‘A Celebration of Wolfgang Rihm’ includes top-class performances of his works and pointed contributions. The audience and the composer’s many companions are invited to meet and reminisce together.

The third event of the A Celebration of Wolfgang Rihm begins with a short introduction to the work before one of the most impressive works by the mature Rihm is heard: ‘Vigilia’ for six voices and ensemble from 2006. Wolfgang Rihm used seven Passion texts as a textual basis, which are sung a capella by a six-part vocal ensemble. These motets are each interrupted by instrumental interludes (Sonata I-VII). In the most extensive final section (Miserere), the sung and played parts finally come together.

The oeuvre of the German composer and musicologist Wolfgang Rihm is immense. In addition to three symphonies, nine operas and a large number of solo and chamber music works, “Vigilia” occupies a very special place as one of the most impressive compositions in his oeuvre. This music manages to be directly accessible to both connoisseurs and less accustomed listeners of new music. Vigils are night watches in the Catholic liturgy, which are spent in scripture readings or prayers and, in the concentration of darkness, are intended to prepare for special church festivals, especially Easter. Rihm refers to this custom and the old music-historical tradition of the responsorial cycle, as shaped by Carlo Gesualdo (1560–1613), for example.

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.

Coproduction HORNROH MODERN ALPHORN QUARTET & ENSEMBLE PHOENIX BASEL

The use of long signal horns in many mountainous regions of Asia and Europe points to a long history of cultural cross-fertilisation. The alphorn and similar wooden horns are played in Europe’s mountains from the Alps to the Carpathians.
The first written mention of an alphorn in Switzerland dates from 1527; an entry in an account book of the St. Urban monastery refers to “two batzen to a Valais man with an alphorn”.
In my new piece “Fichten” (spruces), the alphorn eludes specific local influences. The four alphorns represent, as it were, a Eurasian primal instrument, which is juxtaposed with an instrumental ensemble.
In five parts, a sound topography of the alphorns emerges, which is taken up by the ensemble and placed in ever-changing contexts. The ensemble develops continuously, moving into ever more distant regions. Yet it can never completely escape the foundation of the horns. (Martin Jaggi – 2025)

The Bavarian-born German composer Georg Haider writes about his work “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, the quartet consists of 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) + Hornroh Modern Alphorn Quartet (4 alphorns) I see 12 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.

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)

This project is supported by:
Abteilung Kultur Basel-Stadt
GGG Basel
Ernst Göhner Stiftung
association Caroline Charrière
H. & M. Hofmann-Stiftung

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. As an introduction to this late work, baritone Germán Enrique Alcántara sings one of the “Dos Canciónes” composed 35 years earlier, accompanying himself on the guitar.

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 Fernández 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)

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.

FESTIVAL DOLOMITES

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) / Jannik Giger (*1985): “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922/2017)*

SILENT MOVIE & LIVE MUSIC

As a composer and filmmaker, Jannik Giger is used to exploring and overcoming the boundaries between genres. Projects by and with him always bear his unmistakable signature. His affinity with film allows him to set Murnau’s classic “Nosferatu” to music in a sensitive and coherent way, without ever becoming bold or illustrative.

For his new setting of the silent film classic “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922), which was premiered at the Bern Music Festival in 2017, Jannik Giger drew on set pieces from soundtracks to films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock as well as fragments from the Romantic sound world of Franz Schubert. These reminiscences haunt the score, on the one hand as played samples and on the other as compositional recreations for fourteen instrumentalists, thus linking the historicity of the film with the present of its performance. In the transformation of these traces of the sounding past and their juxtaposition with live musicians, Giger blurs the dividing lines between real and virtual sound production. He dissolves the conventional film-musical orchestral sound by overwriting it with a sound collage of alienated orchestral sounds. This has an intoxicating sonic sensuality and fits cleverly into Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s poetic imagery, underlining the dramaturgy of the film and yet remaining an independent unit of meaning. Furthermore, Giger’s composition repeatedly identifies its level of quotation as such and thus becomes a reflection on the nature and effect of film music. (Moritz Achermann)

Kulturzentrum Gustav Mahler Toblach
Dolomitenstraße 41 / 43
Italy, 39034 Toblach (BZ)
High Puster Valley (Alta Pusteria), Dolomites, South Tyrol
UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE

https://www.kulturzentrum-toblach.eu/de/kulturprogramm/festival-dolomites

* from the archive of the foundation Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (www.murnau-stiftung.de) in Wiesbaden (Germany)

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!

“Gassenhauer Trio”

Ensemble Phoenix Basel
plays
classical – romantic
chamber music
with
clarinet, cello and piano
von
Beethoven, Bruch und Brahms

Saturday, 10th of June 2017, 21.00 h
Bar Carambolage Basel

Toshiko Sakakibara – clarinet
Martin Jaggi – cello
Jürg Henneberger – piano

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827):
“Trio” for clarinet, cello and piano op. 11 in B flat major “Gassenhauer” (1797)
–        Allegro con brio
–        Adagio
–        Tema: Pria ch’io l’impegno – Allegretto – Var. I–IX

Max Bruch (1838–1920):
from “Eight Pieces” for clarinet, cello and piano op. 83 (1908/09)
1.     Andante (a-Moll)
2.     Allegro con moto (h-Moll)
3.     Andante con moto (cis-Moll)
4.     Allegro agitato (d-Moll)

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897):
“Trio” for pianoforte, clarinetto and cello op. 114 in a-Moll (1891)
–        Allegro
–        Adagio
–        Andantino grazioso
–        Allegro

Carambolage Bar, Erlenstrasse 34, 4058 Basel

EPhB organised a biennial international composition workshop for the second time in the 2016/17 season. In three preparatory modules – supported by the Swiss Arts Council “Pro Helvetia” – young composers at the beginning of their careers are given the opportunity to experiment with us as a professional specialist ensemble over a period of 18 months.

For the final fourth module – then an integral part of our series – two selected graduates of the preparatory phase are commissioned to compose a new work as a musical “commentary” on a central work of the 20th or 21st century. The new works should “orbit” this composition as “satellites”, so to speak, i.e. make reference to it or contrast it. In 2017, the two satellites will revolve around the “Chamber Concerto”, one of the main works of the Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

The three prize-winning composers whose works were played after this internal concert were Elnaz Seyedi (1st prize), Kevin Juillerat (2nd prize) and Keitaro Takahashi (3rd prize).

Three Swiss composers, who are surprisingly still relatively unknown in Basel, are the focus of this project.

The composer, conductor, guitarist, lecturer and architect Arturo Corrales originally comes from El Salvador, but has lived in Geneva for over twenty years. He is co-founder and musical director of the ensemble “Vortex”, with whom the EPhB performed together in May 2013. Despite its experimental character, his music is strongly influenced by folklore and pop music.

video

The Italian-born composer and conductor Carlo Ciceri has lived in Lugano since 2002. He was a member of the ensemble “RepertorioZero” and co-founder of the group “Crile” a research collective made up of dance theatre, new music and new media. He died in a skiing accident on 22 March 2022.

The composer, choir conductor and organist Michael Pelzel studied in Basel with Detlev Müller-Siemens and Georg Friedrich Haas. In his ensemble composition “Sempiternal lock-in”, Pelzel uses East African “inherent patterns” in the so-called “lock-in” playing technique, which is applied to the marimba-like mallet instruments Akadinda and Amadinda. Two to three percussionists play an instrument from both sides, whereby continuous chains of sixteenth notes are repeatedly combined in different ways, creating fascinating “inherent patterns”. Pelzel is thus inspired to create a highly virtuoso ensemble piece in which the percussion plays a central role.

Jürg Henneberger

In line with our endeavour not to forget the roots of contemporary music and to make them heard again, we are dedicating this concert exclusively to Luc Ferrari’s compositional work. Initially a student of Alfred Cortot (piano) and Arthur Honegger (composition), he was soon in contact with the most important composers of his time (Varèse, Stockhausen, Nono, Maderna and Cage).

In the 1950s, Luc Ferrari was one of the great pioneers of electronic music and, together with Pierre Schaeffer, co-founder of “musique concrète”.

With the performance of his full-length concert spectacle “Portraits de femmes” from 1994 and the inclusion of electronics and two playback tapes, we bear witness to a largely forgotten facet of Luc Ferrari’s important compositional oeuvre.

Jürg Henneberger

What does a performer of electronic music do when he is entrusted with an ensemble for contemporary music? An ensemble that has been cultivating at least one cross-scene and cross-genre programme for years, open and genuinely capable of new things: the two experimental musicians, the young Swiss Jonas Kocher and eRikm, are certainly offered an exciting ‘carte blanche’ here.

Accordionist and composer Jonas Kocher moves between the focal points of composed music and improvisation. His main compositional interest is the relationship between sound, noise on the one hand and silence on the other, as well as the associated specific process of listening.

eRikm, a world-class sound artist, is extremely difficult to classify or categorise; widely recognised as an extraordinary DJ and video artist, eRikm moves virtuously in a wide variety of genres, driven by inventiveness and poetic curiosity.

A la tombée des flamants
En équilibre sur une patte
Le mistral souffle au sein des salins
Pris en étau par les glaces
Au bout de leur sommeil paradoxal
Je voie sous un ciel d’acier
S’effondrer leur pigment vertical

vimeo

Almost from the very beginning, the EPhB has repeatedly focussed on the music and person of Morton Feldman. Fascinated by his inimitably unique language, its expressiveness and depth, as well as the multi-layered interweaving of Morton Feldman’s personality with artists and musicians of his time, his music has become an integral part of EPhB’s programmes.

After having programmed several extended works with very small ensembles, such as “For Philip Guston” and “For Christian Wolff”, we are now devoting ourselves to works with medium-sized ensembles and – untypically for Feldman – of extremely short duration. In chronological order, the programme spans a creative process of twenty-five years (1951–1976) and thus directs the listener’s “gaze” towards changes as well as the profound consistency and coherence in Feldman’s work. Stylistically, it covers almost all the styles that Feldman explored until he found his unmistakable late style, which announces itself with “Routine Investigations”, e.g. graphic notation (“Projections”); Feldman’s “pointillist”, post-Webernian phase (“Two Pieces”, “Piece for 7 Instruments”); indefinite long durations of sounds with uncoordinated interplay (“Durations”) as well as his homage to a great painter friend (“De Kooning”).

Feldman’s unmistakable late style is heralded by “Routine Investigations”.

Jürg Henneberger

“Mouvement”

Ensemble Phoenix Basel & OpusNovus In Concert
Saturday, October 6, 2018, 7:30 PM
Conservatory Orchestra Hall
YST Conservatory, Singapore, 117376, Singapore

with OpusNovus:

Michael Finnissy (*1946):
“Not envious of Rabbits” for unspecified ensemble (2006)

John Cage (1912–1992):
“Six Melodies” for violin and keyboard instrument (1950)

Claude Vivier (1948–1983):
“Pulau Dewata” for variable ensemble (1977)

Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023):
“Je Sens Un Deuxième Coeur” (I feel a second heart) for viola, cello and piano (2003)
IV. Il faut que j’entre (I must come in)
V. Je sens un deuxième cœur qui bat tout près du mien (I feel another heart beating very close to mine)

with Ensemble Phoenix Basel & OpusNovus:

Helmut Lachenmann (*1935):
«Mouvement (– vor der Erstarrung)» (Movement – before congealing) for ensemble (1983/84)

Once a year, EPhB invites experimental musicians with a rather non-academic background to a collaboration. These artists come from areas such as noise, free improvisation, sound art, etc. An exciting combination of the young Chinese performer and sound artist Yiran Zhao, who lives in Berlin, and the experienced British all-round musician Barry Guy and his double bass is planned. Both will conceive and curate one half of the concert each.

Yiran Zhao is a Berlin-based composer and performer. She is the musical director and composer of the experimental music theatre group OBLIVIA, based in Helsinki. In her work she combines different forms of expression – music, performance, light, visual arts and other media. Since her arrival in Europe, she has been working intensively with the physicality of performance, using the human body and objects as compositional material.

Barry Guy is an innovative double bass player and composer whose creative diversity in the fields of jazz improvisation, solo recital, chamber and orchestral music stems from an unusually wide-ranging education and a great desire to experiment – fuelled by his deep devotion to the double bass and the ideal of musical communication.

CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONA CRISIS!

Our “Blanko” projects are already legendary. On the one hand, we have been performing in this self-invented format for well over ten years, and on the other hand, the unusually intensive nature of the collaboration and engagement with two artists per season unites us in a particularly intense bond. Consciously not coming from the usual curriculum of a composer’s training, we bring together lateral entrants, “sonic artists” in the broadest sense, visual artists with a clear musical affinity, etc., with our expert ensemble members for electronic or amplified music.

Marco Papiro – “Vamos a la playa”

Marco Papiro is a Swiss-Italian graphic artist, multi-instrumentalist and electronic music producer. Active as a solo artist since the 90s, he was part in the band “MIR” in company of Daniel Buess, whose posthumous last LP has just been released. Papiro’s music is imbued with a personal language, picturesque, mystical and at times humorous. “Vamos a la playa” is his first composition for ensemble.

Dragos Tara – “Escape Room #2”

The musical work of the French-Swiss composer and double bassist Dragos Tara moves fluidly between composition and improvisation. His work is strongly influenced by the exploration of “game theory”, the questioning of traditional social rituals, and the possibilities of instrumental and physical extensions. The series “Escape Room”, for ensemble and video, plays with multiple forms of narration, such as those found in “gaming culture”. It takes ensemble and audience on an imaginary journey into a shared virtual world.

The program was made up for in the 2020/2021 season on 28th and 29th May  2021.

CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONA CRISIS!

The work of American composer Morton Feldman has been a matter of the heart during the last 22 years for us. His works are characterized by an extraordinary stylistic diversity, ranging from graphic scores to extremely complex, polyrhythmic compositions. An example of this is his trio “Bass Clarinet and Percussion”: the percussion duo and the bass clarinet follow two metrically independent and independent paths, which nevertheless cross again at the end of each score page. Feldman at home in the artistic circles of New York and had friendly contact with the most important painters and poets of his time. The septet “For Frank O’Hara” is a tribute to the poet who died in an accident in 1966. Samuel Beckett wrote the libretto for Morton Feldman’s only opera, “Neither”. The new setting of the Beckett radio play “Words and Music” and the compositional homage “For Samuel Beckett” were both written in 1987, the year of Feldman’s death.

The program was made up for in the 2020/2021 season on 17th and 18th April  2021.

CANCELLED DUE TO THE CORONA CRISIS!

Mario Davidovsky is one of the great figures of American New Music – but has hardly been played in Europe. As a pioneer of electronic music, he was already working at the “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” in 1960. His work includes by far not only electronic music. His most famous works, the “Synchronisms”, a series of over a dozen works written over a period of more than 40 years, have influenced generations of composers. In combining “classical” instruments with pre-produced electronic sounds, Davidovsky, unlike many other composers of this genre, is not interested in special “sound effects” in any way, but rather seeks a fusion of instrumental sound with electronics, resulting in both continuity and intrinsic musical expression. The earliest “Synchronisms” date from a time when today’s sound technology was still in its infancy, but they are nevertheless masterpieces without equal; the long time span in which the “Synchronisms” were created also documents the technical progress in this field over the time. In addition to a large number of awards for his work, Mario Davidovsky received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 explicitly for his work “Synchronisms No. 6”.

Luciano Berio is in many ways a European counterpart to Davidovsky. His in-depth study of individual instruments and their playing techniques in his Sequenzas is based on a similar interest that Davidovsky pursued in his Synchronisms. Our program features a work by the young Berio, composed at the end of the 1950s. In Différences, he explores the infinite variety of sound possibilities of the five live instruments and juxtaposes them with their “mirror images” recorded on tape and electronic sounds. Sometimes an electronic shadow of the instruments, sometimes foregrounded, the tape is conceived as a fully-fledged sixth chamber music partner.

Since the concerts had to be cancelled due to the Covid crisis, the EPhB decided to do a combined audio and video production of Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms”.

Bandcamp

Façade – an Entertainment combines the dazzling incidental music of William Walton with the surrealistic, onomatopoeic poems of the English poet Edith Sitwell, performed by the renowned Scottish voice artist and actor Graham F. Valentine. With her striving for freedom, Edith Sitwell fought against Victorian double standards and provoked many a scandal in the 1920s. Today, the rise of regressive forces repeatedly threatens our democratic values. Two new, explosive ensemble works by Swiss-based composers Asia Ahmetjanova and Charlotte Torres, which were premiered at the “Gare du Nord” Basel in April of this year, provide fresh courage in the program of Ensemble Phoenix Basel.

NAXOS Hallenkonzerte

Produktionshaus NAXOS
Waldschmidtstraße 19
60316 Frankfurt am Main

An immanent musical-theatrical firework spectacle for and with Svea Schildknecht.

György Ligeti’s only opera “Le Grand Macabre” is based on a play by the Belgian poet Michel de Ghelderode, one of the most important representatives of absurdist theater alongside Eugène Jonesco, Alfred Jarry and Samuel Beckett. The arrangement of three arias for coloratura soprano and ensemble was written by Elgar Howarth, who was the study director of the premiere of the opera at Stockholm in 1978. The German composer Manfred Stahnke, who studied with Ligeti in Hamburg and now teaches composition there himself, wrote his work “Lumpengalerie” in 1999, based on a recorded improvisation that was reworked into a sextet. The South Korean composer Unsuk Chin wrote the ensemble piece “Gougalōn” in 2009 after a visit to the suburbs of Seoul in memory of the old, impoverished neighborhood of the 1960s where she spent her childhood. She describes the work as “imagined folk music”.

In Memoriam Péter Eötvös (2.1.1944–24.3.2024)

The Hungarian composer and conductor Péter Eötvös is considered one of the central figures of contemporary music. Eötvös studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest and had a major influence as a conductor of leading orchestras and ensembles.
Eötvös’ compositions are characterised by a precise structure and complex rhythmic and tonal textures. In “The Sequences of the Wind”, Eötvös illustrates eight different types of wind – from calm to whirlwind. In “Brass – The Metal Space”, the concert hall is explored acoustically in a theatrical way. On the occasion of his unexpected death in spring 2024, Ensemble Phoenix Basel is organising a memorial concert with three ensemble works written by Eötvös over a period of 32 years.
Our guest conductor is the Hungarian composer, clarinettist and conductor Gregory Vajda, programme director of the Péter Eötvös Contemporary Music Foundation in Budapest since 2018.

Péter Eötvös:

“Octet” (in memoriam Karlheinz Stockhausen) for flute, clarinet, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets and 2 trombones (2007)
dedicated to the Reina Sofia School of Music

“Brass – The Metal Space” action piece for seven brass players (2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones and tuba) and 2 percussionists without conductor (1990)

“Windsequenzen – The Sequences of the Wind” for flute solo, 4 woodwinds, tuba, double bass, bass drum, accordion and wind imitation (1975–2002)
1.    Windless I
2.   Three Sequences of the Mountain Wind
3.   Seven Sequences of the Whirlwind
4.   Sequence of the Morning Breeze
5.   Four Sequences of the Sea Wind – North Wind
6.   Four Sequences of the Sea Wind – South Wind
7.   Four Sequences of the Sea Wind – East – West Wind
8.   Windless II

Concert in collaboration with the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), class for electro-acoustic composition Germán Toro Pérez

Mario Davidovsky’s “Synchronisms” are masterpieces of instrumental music with playback tape, which we had already planned in 2020 but were unable to perform due to the coronavirus. Instead, a double LP was created. For the new edition of the idea of playing Davidovsky’s music in concert, we were able to win the ICST of the ZHdK as a co-production partner. This collaboration will result in seven new compositions by students for the same instrumentation.

Mario Davidovsky (4.3.1934–23.8.2019) is one of the great figures of American New Music – but has hardly been played in Europe. As a pioneer of electronic music, he was already working at the “Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center” in 1960. His work includes by far not only electronic music. His most famous works, the “Synchronisms”, a series of over a dozen works written over a period of more than 40 years, have influenced generations of composers. In combining “classical” instruments with pre-produced electronic sounds, Davidovsky, unlike many other composers of this genre, is not interested in special “sound effects” in any way, but rather seeks a fusion of instrumental sound with electronics, resulting in both continuity and intrinsic musical expression. The earliest “Synchronisms” date from a time when today’s sound technology was still in its infancy, but they are nevertheless masterpieces without equal; the long time span in which the “Synchronisms” were created also documents the technical progress in this field over the time. In addition to a large number of awards for his work, Mario Davidovsky received the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 explicitly for his work “Synchronisms No. 6”.

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931) / Jannik Giger (*1985): “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922/2017)

Co-production with “Stadtkino Basel”

As a composer and filmmaker, Jannik Giger is used to exploring and overcoming the boundaries between genres. Projects by and with him always bear his unmistakable signature. His affinity with film allows him to set Murnau’s classic “Nosferatu” to music in a sensitive and coherent way, without ever becoming bold or illustrative.

For his new setting of the silent film classic “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” (1922), which was premiered at the Bern Music Festival in 2017, Jannik Giger drew on set pieces from soundtracks to films by David Lynch and Alfred Hitchcock as well as fragments from the Romantic sound world of Franz Schubert. These reminiscences haunt the score, on the one hand as played samples and on the other as compositional recreations for fourteen instrumentalists, thus linking the historicity of the film with the present of its performance. In the transformation of these traces of the sounding past and their juxtaposition with live musicians, Giger blurs the dividing lines between real and virtual sound production. He dissolves the conventional film-musical orchestral sound by overwriting it with a sound collage of alienated orchestral sounds. This has an intoxicating sonic sensuality and fits cleverly into Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s poetic imagery, underlining the dramaturgy of the film and yet remaining an independent unit of meaning. Furthermore, Giger’s composition repeatedly identifies its level of quotation as such and thus becomes a reflection on the nature and effect of film music. (Moritz Achermann)

Vigilia – In Memoriam Wolfgang Rihm (13.3.1952–27.7.2024)

Concert in collaboration with the “SCHOLA HEIDELBERG” (director: Ekkehard Windrich)

The oeuvre of the German composer and musicologist Wolfgang Rihm, who died at the end of July this year after a serious illness, is immense. In addition to three symphonies, nine operas and a large number of solo and chamber music works, “Vigilia” occupies a very special place as one of the most impressive compositions in his oeuvre. This music manages to be directly accessible to both connoisseurs and less accustomed listeners of new music. Vigils are night watches in the Catholic liturgy, which are spent in scripture readings or prayers and, in the concentration of darkness, are intended to prepare for special church festivals, especially Easter. Rihm refers to this custom and the old music-historical tradition of the responsorial cycle, as shaped by Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), for example. Wolfgang Rihm used seven Passion texts as a textual basis, which are sung a capella by a six-part vocal ensemble. These motets are each interrupted by instrumental interludes (Sonata I-VII). In the most extensive final part (Miserere), the instrumental and vocal ensembles perform together.

For the concert introduction and a short tribute to Wolfgang Rihm, we were able to win the Berlin-based composer Nico Sauer, who was a student of Wolfgang Rihm at the Karlsruhe University of Music from 2010 to 2015.

ŽiŽi – How do my words sound?

The Ensemble Phoenix Basel plays text scores from the Druckstelle

How do my words sound? Are there loud and less loud sentences? Why does my text rustle, thunder or squeak? How can it be played with instruments?

The children at the Druckstelle explored these and other questions during the spring break. Together with the musicians from Ensemble Phoenix Basel, they explored the relationship between words and sound and used experimental writing and printing techniques to create their own compositions. The result of this exploration are several text scores, which are interpreted by the Ensemble Phoenix Basel.

Mediators:

Muriel Comby, Marcel Gross, Zora Marti, Sebastian Meyer, Mathis Rickli, Gladys Rüegsegger-Flores, Deborah Senn

Supported by the Swisslosfonds Basel

Unveiling the Universe
Art and Science Summit
70 years of discoveries at CERN

CERN Science Gateway
Sergio Marchionne Auditorium

15:00
Welcome. Charlotte Warakaulle, Director for International Relations, CERN, and Mónica Bello, Head of Arts at CERN.

15:15 – 17:45
Panel I: Fundamentals.
Moderated by Michael Doser.
Speakers: Alan Bogana, Julius von Bismarck, Roman Keller, Semiconductor (Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt), and Tara Shears.

Panel II: The Unanswered Questions.
Moderated by José-Carlos Mariátegui.
Speakers: Chloé Delarue, Elisa Storelli, Rosa Barba, Tamara Vázquez-Schröder, and Yunchul Kim.

Panel III: Scientific Imaginations.
Moderated by Mónica Bello.
Speakers: Diego Blas, Chiara Mariotti, Lea Porsager, Patricia Domínguez, and Suzanne Treister.

18:00 – 18:45
Visit to the exhibition Exploring the Unknown with artists present.

19:00 – 20:40
Conversations with scientists. 70 years of discoveries “Unveiling the Universe”.
Moderated by Clara Nellist.
Speakers: David Gross, Djuna Croon, Gian Francesco Giudice, and Tara Shears.

21:00 – 21:30
“Enigma”, a work by visual artist Sigurður Guðjónsson (*1975) and composer Anna Þorvaldsdóttir (*1977). The music is performed live by the string quartet Ensemble Phoenix Basel.

Walk-in music theater installation between intoxication and ritual

In their first opera production, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg create a posthumanist “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In doing so, they break down boundaries between man and machine, future and past, theater, visual art and virtual reality. The constantly rotating stage becomes the living space of a new kind of community. It cultivates a hieroglyphic language of movement and seems to live according to its own enigmatic rules. Inspired by the unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass created a 20th century musical masterpiece that breaks all the rules of opera and follows no linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns make time sensually tangible and put the audience into trance. The audience can move freely and experience the work individually.

other artists:

Performance/Dance – Suzan Boogaerdt, Tarren Johnson, Frank Willens, Tommy Cattin, Dominic Santia, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Basler Madrigalisten (conductor: Raphael Immoos) – Anna Miklashevich, Viola Molnar, Viviane Hasler (soprano), Barbara Schingnitz, Schoschana Kobelt, Leslie Leon (alto), Patrick Siegrist, Daniel Issa, Christopher Wattam (tenor), Othmar Sturm, Valerio Zanolli, Amir Tiroshi (bass)

Opéra, Grande Halle de La Villette, Paris

Production of Theater Basel in cooperation with the Philharmonie de Paris and Festival d’Automne

further information:

https://philharmoniedeparis.fr/fr/activite/opera/26308-philip-glass-einstein-beach

Once a year, EPhB invites experimental musicians with a rather non-academic background to collaborate. These artists come from fields such as noise, free improvisation, sound art, etc. The young percussionist and improviser Camille Emaille and the Zurich composer, sound artist, theater musician and improviser Thomas Peter will each conceive and curate a concert half. In this case, the ensemble does not “merely” implement a musical text, but participates in the composition in a direct way.

A percussionist from the Alpes de Haute Provence, where she lives, Camille Emaille (*1993) followed a path of classical and then contemporary music that led from a mountain music school to the Basel Music Academy or even to Mills College in Oakland for improvised music. Her practice today is based on a physical relationship to sound, both in the material and volume of the instruments she works with, as if working the earth, and in the physical energy used to play. Whether through improvisation, written or pre-structured music, she searches for that line where energy, concentration and listening are activated on such a level that the awareness of oneself in relation to the rest of the world eventually disappears, like walking for weeks.

Thomas Peter (*1971) is a musician, composer and lecturer. He has been active in the fields of electro-acoustic music composition, improvised music and sound installations for over 25 years and teaches at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He lives and works in Zurich. His concert activities include performances as a solo artist and as an interpreter of contemporary music in Europe, Asia, North and South America. In his compositions, he deals in various ways with the interaction possibilities of the musicians within the ensemble, be it through improvisational settings or through dynamic or freely set feedback possibilities. Thomas Peter studied audio design and improvisation at the Basel Academy of Music. His composition neugut.rand won first prize in the Electroacoustic Composition Competition at the Musica Viva Festival in Lisbon. In 2013 (together with André Meier) and 2017 he received the work grant from the Kuratorium Aargau.

The Japanese composer Noriko Hisada is a quite extraordinary voice of Japan, whose music is unjustly performed far too rarely. The “ensemble für neue musik zürich” has been promoted the music of this composer, who was still unknown in Europe at the time, for over 30 years and premiered her quintet “Prognostication” in Boswil in 1991 with Jürg Henneberger at the piano. EPhB now presents this work together with the seven-part ensemble piece “Led by the Yellow Bricks”, written 25 years later and inspired by Lyman Frank Baum’s children’s book “The Wizard of Oz”.

Programming William Walton’s and Edith Sitwell’s once provocative work with Graham Valentine as narrator is a pleasure for us in different ways! The English poet Edith Sitwell became an icon of lesbian-gay movement not only through her poems, but also through her eccentric lifestyle and her uncompromisingly non-conformist views, provoking many a scandal with her appearance already in the early 1920s. At the premiere of “Façade,” she spoke her surrealist verses invisibly behind a painted screen with a hole cut out for a giant megaphone.

In combination with the commissions to the two young composers Asia Ahmetjanova from Latvia and Charlotte Torres from France, both living in Switzerland, current artistic dynamite is guaranteed.

Our response to the global boycott of Russian artists in a pacifist frame of mind. These “other” voices from Russia must and should be heard, for they have significant things to say, whether older or younger.

The composer Galina Ustvolskaïa was once a favorite student of Dmitri Shostakovich and lived in seclusion in Siberia after the end of the Second World War until her death. Her works were hardly played until 1968. It was not until the 1990s that she achieved a certain degree of recognition abroad.

Alexander Khubeev uses multimedia means to set to music and illustrate the poem “Don’t leave the room” (1970) by the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, who was expatriated from the Soviet Union in 1972. This poetic warning against the threat of the outside world takes on prophetic significance after the current “Corona” experiences.

The Russian composer Marina Khorkova lives and works in Berlin. In her work “collision” extreme registers, fragile and brutal sound gestures, static and unmediated eventfulness collide with each other in numerous contrasting sound fields. It was premiered by the ensemble “ascolta” in Stuttgart in 2015.

In collaboration with “Musikpodium Zürich”

Is there a “Swissness” in terms of composing? Instead of an answer to this question, we confront the audience with three new works by Swiss composers from three generations, flanked by a work by our friend Erik Oña, who died much too early.

The youngest – Sebastian J. Meyer – is, like his teacher Erik Oña, in constant search of the best sound with reduced material, be it in terms of choice of instruments or compositional means.

Trumpet player, composer and improviser André Meier – also a former composition student of Erik Oña – deals in his compositional work mainly with algorithmic or machine processes, sonifications, modular and open forms.

The pianist and composer Jean-Jacques Dünki is also active as a musicologist, dealing with both historical performance practice (fortepiano and clavichord) and the composers of the New Viennese School and contemporary music. As a composer he is largely self-taught. He is writing a “Concertino” for cello and ensemble for the French cellist Pierre Strauch and us.

With “Octandre” Edgar Varèse wrote an epoch-making work for a large chamber music ensemble and at the same time founded a new genre: Four woodwinds and three brass instruments are supplemented by a double bass to form an octet – with the complete omission of keyboard instruments, percussion and high strings. In our competition for young musicians “Phoenix Satellite” we have set the task of composing a new work in this instrumentation that in some way refers to “Octandre” and circles this work like a satellite. As a conclusion of this workshop with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel and Detlev Müller-Siemens (in October with Johannes Schöllhorn for the ill Detlev Müller-Siemens) as composition coach, the three prize winners will present their new “Satellite” compositions together with “Octandre” by Edgar Varèse.
The work “Monolith” by the German composer Thomas Bruttger was commissioned by the “Ensemble Aventure” (Freiburg i. Br.) in 1991.

Edgar Varèse: “Octandre”

“Octandre” was written for eight instruments (seven wind instruments and a double bass) and was composed in the same year as Igor Stravinsky’s Octet. Together with “Density 21,5”, it is the only work by Varèse that does without percussion. It is also the only one that is divided into consecutive movements. Nevertheless, it is typical of the style and technique of the composer, who consciously moved outside of tradition, was a fierce enemy of development and for whom timbre, the most important parameter of composition, was considered a structural element. “What is striking from the outset,” writes Arthur Hoérée, “is the unusual instrumentation on which the composition is based. The flute rises to C sharp 6, the oboe to G 5 and the bassoon to C 4, the trombone moves in the middle regions of the trumpet. The flutter tongue (rolling with the tongue, which produces a vibrating sound) is used regularly. Each of the movements of “Octandre” opens with an instrumental solo, which proves that the melodic line is nevertheless not unimportant. The first movement (Assez lent) begins and ends with an oboe solo, which is supported by the clarinet and double bass in the introduction. The second movement (Very lively and nervous) is introduced by a piccolo solo in a low register (!). It moves into the third movement (Grave) by sustaining a high note from the double bass, followed by an opening solo from the bassoon, which precedes a ‘lively and jubilant’ fugato passage with successive entries from the bassoon and clarinet – imitating the oboe.

(Myriam Chimènes)

Thomas Bruttger: «Monolith»

The title is to be understood not only in free association with some parts of my piece, but also in the sense of structural processing as “as if chiseled from a block”. The starting point of the composition is a static-repetitive “central sound” composed of three layers, which in the further course of the piece undergoes a multitude of prismatic refractions into smaller individual sounds up to the complete dissolution of the block-like-vertical events into successive-horizontal individual particles. The piece unfolds in eight large sections, which in their block-like nature have a habitus of immobility, and thus the musical form appears as a constant change of different aggregate states, similar to chemical fermentation processes, with varying degrees of density. On the other hand, there is a dynamic, process-like principle of linking, in such a way that from section to section the experiences of the previous parts of the form are taken up in order to develop them further, either continuously or discontinuously.
The piece learns from itself, so to speak, in order to constantly generate itself anew.

(Thomas Bruttger)

3 winners of the “Satellite” workshop 2023:

1st prize:

Asia Ahmetjanova: «Ich möchte aufhören zu singen»

The piece “Ich möchte aufhören zu singen” (I want to stop singing) with the full title “Ich möchte aufhören zu singen, damit mein Lied von den anderen übernommen wird” (I want to stop singing so that my song is taken over by the others) tells the story of an individual’s journey through life.
Christoph Bösch – piccolo flute – represents the main character, who goes through different phases of life and experiences his role anew at each stage. The priorities change through different encounters. The ability to imitate and adapt shapes decisions and the nature of activities. One’s own voice resembles many things, except oneself.
Is it inevitable to feel the need to become part of the whole?
What happens to the individual’s world when he or she radically takes on responsibility?
Decisive repetitions.
Sometimes the silent voice is the most authentic.
It goes on, everything starts all over again, but in a different key – we have slipped down a minor third.

(Asia Ahmetjanova)

2nd prize ex aequo:

Francesca Gaza: “ruhe zur lautesten stunde”

“ruhe zur lautesten stunde” (quietness at the loudest hour) was inspired by a scene I saw a few months ago in the Negev Desert. From an elevated vantage point, I looked down on calm, silence and great emptiness, but when I entered it, I found that it was full of colorful, buzzing insects and sounds that made the apparent emptiness and silence come alive loudly and explosively. These contrasts of loud silence and filled tranquillity significantly inspired the work. Color and coloration are the central elements that functioned as a satellite to Varèse’s “Octandre”.

(Francesca Gaza)

Tze Yeung Ho: «hortensia»

«Hortensia» works with metaphorically inverted motivic fragments loaned from Edgar Varèse’s «Octandre». The various fragments are pieced together in eight short sections marked by tempo changes across three movements. The eight short sections are derived from the «H-chapter» or the eighth section of Danish poet Inger Christensen’s «Alfabet». The eight selected words, taken from the Norwegian translation of the book, are as follows: “hage” (garden), “hymne” (hymn), “halvmåne” (half moon), “halvsilke” (half-silk), “helle” (stop, as in doorstop), “husly” (shelter), “hagl” (hail) and “hortensia” (hydrangea). The eight words served as inspiration to how the musical fragments were arranged and treated in the various tempo markings taken from «Octandre». This work is parasitic in nature. It is meant to be performed with Varèse’s original work interspersed within this composition’s three movements.

(Tze Yeung Ho)

We conclude our season with the series “Blanko”. The main focus lies in this ongoing project on discussing  the language of today’s music in a free form. Ensemble Phoenix Basel invites two experimental musicians from the fields of noise, free improvisation, sound art, etc. to collaborate. This year we are invited to play this program in the “Antifestival 2K+” in Novi Sad.

Svetlana Maraš will open the evening. The Serbian composer and sound artist works in fields between experimental music and sound art. Since 2021, she is co-director of the Electronic Studio Basel and professor of creative music technology at the Hochschule für Musik FHNW.

Lucas Niggli takes over in the second half of the concert. The Swiss drummer and sound innovator, who, throughout his career, has been an experimentalist and pioneer in the search for new musical worlds, created and performed his piece “PLAY!” together with EPhB in the “Blanko 2022” program.

With breathtaking emotional power, Michael Hersch and Stephanie Fleischmann retell the story of Emperor Nero and his wife Poppaea: the most powerful woman in the world 2000 years ago, a ruthless fight for one’s own goals, the burning of Rome and the end of a world. This opera premiere directed by Markus Bothe ventures on a red-hot journey to the dark side of Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea”. The Basel-based company “Piertzovanis Töws Architekten” turns the stage design into a statement for consciously dealing with the consequences of one’s own actions.

“POPPAEA is an opera about a woman whose desire is limitless; a woman who must endure many things and make her way through a world in which women are systematically silenced. The violence that prevails in this world is extreme. It begs the question: How far have we come? How little have we progressed?”

Michael Hersch / Stephanie Fleischmann

https://zeitraeumebasel.com/produktionen

“Sound Plasma” is a festival dedicated to promote a different view towards intonation.

The 6th edition of the festival experiments with new intonation ideas with a flavour of electroacoustic music. For the first time, a particular focus on music from Switzerland takes place in Tallinn and Berlin.

Festival’s highlights include the Estonian debut performance of Ensemble Phoenix Basel.

The festival reaches out to the Swiss music scene not only because of the impeccable quality of the music/performances but because of the nurturing effect the Swiss musical culture has on developing special and uncompromisingly unique musical voices.

After tackling various aspects of more established aesthetics, based on various intonation systems, the current edition of the festival dares to explore a brand new point of view with a basis in the electronic, and sometimes corny, sounds of the 70s and 80s.

Concert as part of the festival “30 ans de l’OCG”.

The composer and improviser Norbert Möslang from St. Gallen (CH), has composed a new work for the inauguration of the “Binary Clock”, commissioned by “Hochbauamt St. Gallen”, which was premiered in April 2018 at “Bahnhofshalle St. Gallen” by musicians of the EPhB.  Now the composition “patterns” will be repeated at the “bâtimement des forces motrices” in Geneva.

Bandcamp

Swiss composer and improviser Norbert Möslang, who comes from St. Gallen, composed a new work for the inauguration of the “Binary Clock” commissioned by the St. Gallen Building Authority, which was premiered in April 2018 in the Bahnhofshalle St. Gallen by musicians from EPhB. Now the composition “patterns” will be performed again at Sitterwerk St. Gallen on the occasion of Möslang’s 70th birthday.

Bandcamp

We conclude our season with the series “Blanko”. The main focus lies in this ongoing project on discussing  the language of today’s music in a free form. Ensemble Phoenix Basel invites two experimental musicians from the fields of noise, free improvisation, sound art, etc. to collaborate.

Svetlana Maraš will open the evening. The Serbian composer and sound artist works in fields between experimental music and sound art. Since 2021, she is co-director of the Electronic Studio Basel and professor of creative music technology at the Hochschule für Musik FHNW.

Fred Frith takes over in the second half of the concert. The English multi-instrumentalist is best known for his guitar playing and likes to use all kinds of everyday objects to make his instruments sound. From 2011 to 2020 he taught improvisation at the Hochschule für Musik Basel.

In September 1971, prisoners at Attica Prison in upstate New York revolted against prison conditions and took several prison guards hostage. On the governor’s orders, the National Guard subsequently stormed the prison, killing 32 people. Among them was Sam Melville, a bomber who had written a letter to his brother in spring 1971 that was published in a magazine. Back after a long trip to Italy, the American composer and pianist Frederic Rzewski read the letter in the magazine and was moved by the poetic quality and the description of time experience. This was the cause for him to write  “Coming Together,” a piece for variable ensemble and speaker; a composition that has become a prime example of music as resistance; consistently constructed and with a precisely calculated final climax.

The Palestinian composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi has developed his own musical language. Drawn from Western European avant-garde and Arabic musical practice, it radiates a special power. His enthusiasm for European classical music and the aesthetics of New Music led him to Germany at the age of 22. There he also found his way back to the musical culture of his country of origin. Since 2016, Samir Odeh-Tamimi has been a member of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.

Like our third guest Mathias Spahlinger, he however already since 1996. The German composer creates  works extremely consistent and uncompromising, versatile, conceptual and with great care between aesthetic autonomy and political awareness. In 2014 he was awarded the Grand Art Prize of the Academy of Arts  (Grosser Kunstpreis der Akademie der Künste), thus receiving the highest honor for his life’s work.

English composer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson has become known primarily as an experimental rock and improvisation musician. Among other things, he founded the politically and musically radical group “HENRY COW” together with Fred Frith in 1968. He has also written compositions for classical formations. In 2003 the Ensemble Phoenix Basel played his quartet “Repulsion”, which was released as a live recording on our portrait CD (“United Phoenix Records”, 2004). His new work “under the void”, which he wrote for us, will finally have its world premiere after seven years.

After his studies Colombian composer Leonardo Idrobo stayed in Basel. We’ve followed his work closely and have premiered one of his early works in 2011. We look forward and are curious for his new work.

Christophe Schiess from Biel contributes a newly composed piece for us after a creative break due to family reasons. Since he had studied with Georg Friedrich Haas in Basel, you can find his name more often in our programs. Christoph Schiess is now himself teaching in Basel.

The evening begins in the Middle Ages and then takes a big jump to the present day.

We are extremely happy to present Michael Hersch with his new composition for soprano and ensemble: “one step to the next, worlds ending”. We’ve collaborated 2021 in the music theater production “Poppaea”, and are pleased to continue with this new special program focus last season’s great experience. Our soprano soloist Ah Young Hong – splendid in the title role in “Poppaea” – will take on the solo part.

The concert program is framed by newly arranged works from the 14th century: by Guillaume de Machaut as well as by Jacob de Senleches and Jean Galiot. These belong to the style epoch of the “Ars subtilior”, which developed further from Machaut’s musical ideas. We perform them in an arrangement by Erik Oña. The Argentine composer, who died in 2019 had taught at the Electronic Studio of the FHNW in Basel since 2001.

The program is complemented by the compositions “After Serra” and “Aequilibria”. American composer Jason Eckardt refers to the monumental sculptures of visual artist Richard Serra. One of Serra’s sculptures – “Intersection” – stands on the place in front of the “Theater Basel” since 1992. Islandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir captivates in her music with soft, spherical sounds.

The concert closes as it began with the motet “Puis qu’en oubli” by Guillaume de Machaut in the arrangement by Michael Hersch.

Kicking off the new season with one of the most extraordinary voices in new music.

Liza Lim is a researcher, educator and composer. In her work, she focuses on intercultural collaboration. She explores themes such as beauty, the relationship between humans and nature, incorporating all of human history, and the transformative power of ritual. Born in Perth, Australia, to Chinese emigrants, she brings together influences of Chinese, Japanese, Korean culture and the sounds of Australia’s indigenous peoples with the aesthetics of contemporary Western music.

We give Liza’s music a stage in this portrait concert with two works that are particularly close to our hearts – an early piece and a more recent composition.

“Garden of earthly desire” (1988/89)

I began writing Garden of Earthly Desire with the idea of narrating simultaneously many different (musical) stories on many levels. My primary inspiration came from Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies in which sequences of fables arise from the interpretation of arrangement of tarot cards. The stories thrown up by this process intersect and illuminate each other with a multiformity of meanings that Calvino ‘reads’ from the cards, embedded as they are with memories, centuries-old of Western culture.

This kaleidoscopic patterning of meanings finds accord with my recent aesthetic preoccupations with fragmented, exploded structures that I term ‘debris’ forms. Central to this area of exploration lies a belief in a hypothetical ‘wholeness’ of an idea – the idea that is the underlying principle of the music – that presents itself, coalesced into a momentary flash of consciousness, in the precompositional stage. In the process of trying to realize this idea however, it becomes splintered and fragmented in a field of technical considerations – strategies, games, filters – that is, different readings of possible meanings of the idea. The piece of music therefore is not so much a completed «art-object» as the resultant ‘bloody traceries’ of layers of interpretation.

The work offers no ‘neat’ final solution but rather, seeks to present a complex flux of expression in time – a celebration of the multiplicity and richness of the life in and around us. Hence the appeal of the tarot – the characters of these archetypal figures find musical analogies in the work. There is the Juggler – the alchemical, mercurial figure engaging in a dialectic of extremes; The High Priestess – totem of initiation and the gathering of energizing forces; the Empress – fecund, pagan, teeming with life…

The work’s connection with the fifteenth century Flemish painter, Hieronymous Bosch and his tryptich Garden of Earthly Delights was arrived at when I had already completed a substantial part of the work. I saw remarkable correspondences between various aspects of the Bosch – its tripartite structure; the surrealistic richness of the moods explored in the panels; the detailed fantasy figures – and the charaoters of the different strands of my music that I had organised into a 3 x 3 x 3 cycle of sections.

Liza Lim

“Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus” (2017)

Work commissioned for Klangforum Wien by Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik & with the support of the APRA AMCOS Art Music Fund (Australia).

1. Anthropogenic debris
2. Retrograde inversion
3. Autocorrect
4. Transmission
5. Dawn chorus

Every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence. Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects.
– Timothy Morton, “Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality”

The fairest order in the world is a heap of random sweepings
– Herakleitos

Vast conglomerations of plastic trash circulate in five gyres in the world’s ocean currents and are ground into toxic fragments that sediment on remote islands and within the fish we eat. Our every-day rubbish shelters hermit crabs even as acid waters dissolve their former shell habitations. Albatrosses scoop up meals of plastic packaging to feed their chicks that then choke and starve as they ingest this colourful non-food.

Like this plastic waste, all time and its traces are with us still, albeit in residual and pulverised states. I have made a music out of heterogeneous relics of the past – a coarse sampling of ‘extinction events’ ranging from the spectral echoes of a creaking 19th century in piano music ‘on an overgrown path’ (Janáček), to a faulty transcription of a recording of the last mating call ever heard of the now extinct Kauai O’o bird, to tracings of a star map that captured the Chinese southern night sky in the 9th century. These time-traces rub against each other in ever-degraded cycles. Fleeting repetitions are pulsations of disappearance and point to the uncertainties of human memory and its collapse in abject forgetting.

There is broken grandeur and there are attempts to sing.

There is the uncanny dawn chorus of the fish-life that populates an endangered Australian coral reef.

Time breathes out an improbable hope.

Liza Lim

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea?
– Shakespeare, Sonnet No. 65

«Tandem IV» – open presentation of new sounds on the clarinet and how they affect listeners and participants

Participation of the audience with the reading of texts about the weather phenomenon “Sahara dust over Switzerland”.

The call for proposals “work-in-progress” of Pro Helvetia 2021 generated the idea for our new series “Tandem – Musician vs. Composer – on a glass with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel”.

A challenge  in the midst of a worldwide pandemic was to find the smallest artistic and musical unity. Playing or improvising alone was out of question for us. The musician on his/her own was not an image we wanted to favor. Our aim was to provide a counterpart with whom one could enter into an exchange, be stimulated and initiate a process of reflection and creation. On our Tandem bike we also wanted to place a composer. These duos were first selected and then informed about the open process by Christoph Bösch and Lucas Rößner. Before the performance in Basel, the musicians and composers were meant to meet 3 to 4 times within a month to discuss and plan what was to be done in the two sets (20 h and 21 h) of the respective presentation evening.

The task of showing a process or even an unfinished piece presented the respective tandems with a challenge of special kind. To show an open process publicly, maybe even to present a failure in public, is and remains probably unusual. Each tandem pair solved this task in their own way.

“Tandem III” – „BEST of“ random card game – new material combined with classics from “Ms. B.” (a fictional character with some compositional talent).

The call for proposals “work-in-progress” of Pro Helvetia 2021 generated the idea for our new series “Tandem – Musician vs. Composer – on a glass with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel”.

A challenge  in the midst of a worldwide pandemic was to find the smallest artistic and musical unity. Playing or improvising alone was out of question for us. The musician on his/her own was not an image we wanted to favor. Our aim was to provide a counterpart with whom one could enter into an exchange, be stimulated and initiate a process of reflection and creation. On our Tandem bike we also wanted to place a composer. These duos were first selected and then informed about the open process by Christoph Bösch and Lucas Rößner. Before the performance in Basel, the musicians and composers were meant to meet 3 to 4 times within a month to discuss and plan what was to be done in the two sets (20 h and 21 h) of the respective presentation evening

The task of showing a process or even an unfinished piece presented the respective tandems with a challenge of special kind. To show an open process publicly, maybe even to present a failure in public, is and remains probably unusual. Each tandem pair solved this task in their own way.

“Tandem II” – scenic performance and composed action with tape

The call for proposals “work-in-progress” of Pro Helvetia 2021 generated the idea for our new series “Tandem – Musician vs. Composer – on a glass with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel”.

A challenge  in the midst of a worldwide pandemic was to find the smallest artistic and musical unity. Playing or improvising alone was out of question for us. The musician on his/her own was not an image we wanted to favor. Our aim was to provide a counterpart with whom one could enter into an exchange, be stimulated and initiate a process of reflection and creation. On our Tandem bike we also wanted to place a composer. These duos were first selected and then informed about the open process by Christoph Bösch and Lucas Rößner. Before the performance in Basel, the musicians and composers were meant to meet 3 to 4 times within a month to discuss and plan what was to be done in the two sets (20 h and 21 h) of the respective presentation evening.

The task of showing a process or even an unfinished piece presented the respective tandems with a challenge of special kind. To show an open process publicly, maybe even to present a failure in public, is and remains probably unusual. Each tandem pair solved this task in their own way.

“Tandem I” – a playful handling of place and space in direct exchange with the audience.

The call for proposals “work-in-progress” of Pro Helvetia 2021 generated the idea for our new series “Tandem – Musician vs. Composer – on a glass with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel”.

A challenge  in the midst of a worldwide pandemic was to find the smallest artistic and musical unity. Playing or improvising alone was out of question for us. The musician on his/her own was not an image we wanted to favor. Our aim was to provide a counterpart with whom one could enter into an exchange, be stimulated and initiate a process of reflection and creation. On our Tandem bike we also wanted to place a composer. These duos were first selected and then informed about the open process by Christoph Bösch and Lucas Rößner. Before the performance in Basel, the musicians and composers were meant to meet 3 to 4 times within a month to discuss and plan what was to be done in the two sets (20 h and 21 h) of the respective presentation evening.

The task of showing a process or even an unfinished piece presented the respective tandems with a challenge of special kind. To show an open process publicly, maybe even to present a failure in public, is and remains probably unusual. Each tandem pair solved this task in their own way.

Walk-in music theater installation between intoxication and ritual

In their first opera production, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg create a posthumanist “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In doing so, they break down boundaries between man and machine, future and past, theater, visual art and virtual reality. The constantly rotating stage becomes the living space of a new kind of community. It cultivates a hieroglyphic language of movement and seems to live according to its own enigmatic rules. Inspired by the unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass created a 20th century musical masterpiece that breaks all the rules of opera and follows no linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns make time sensually tangible and put the audience into trance. The audience can move freely and experience the work individually.

other artists:

Performance/Dance – Suzan Boogaerdt, Tarren Johnson, Frank Willens, Tommy Cattin, Dominic Santia, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Basler Madrigalisten (conductor: Raphael Immoos) – Anna Miklashevich, Viola Molnar, Viviane Hasler (soprano), Barbara Schingnitz, Schoschana Kobelt, Leslie Leon (alto), Patrick Siegrist, Daniel Issa, Christopher Wattam (tenor), Othmar Sturm, Valerio Zanolli, Amir Tiroshi (bass)

Production of Theater Basel in cooperation with Berliner Festspiele and Wiener Festwochen

further information:

https://www.theater-basel.ch/de/einsteinonthebeach

Walk-in music theater installation between intoxication and ritual

In their first opera production, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg create a posthumanist “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In doing so, they break down boundaries between man and machine, future and past, theater, visual art and virtual reality. The constantly rotating stage becomes the living space of a new kind of community. It cultivates a hieroglyphic language of movement and seems to live according to its own enigmatic rules. Inspired by the unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass created a 20th century musical masterpiece that breaks all the rules of opera and follows no linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns make time sensually tangible and put the audience into trance. The audience can move freely and experience the work individually.

other artists:

Performance/Dance – Suzan Boogaerdt, Tarren Johnson, Frank Willens, Tommy Cattin, Dominic Santia, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Basler Madrigalisten (conductor: Raphael Immoos) – Anna Miklashevich, Viola Molnar, Viviane Hasler (soprano), Barbara Schingnitz, Schoschana Kobelt, Leslie Leon (alto), Patrick Siegrist, Daniel Issa, Christopher Wattam (tenor), Othmar Sturm, Valerio Zanolli, Amir Tiroshi (bass)

Production of Theater Basel in cooperation with Berliner Festspiele and Wiener Festwochen

further information:

https://www.theater-basel.ch/de/einsteinonthebeach

Walk-in music theater installation between intoxication and ritual

In their first opera production, Susanne Kennedy and Markus Selg create a posthumanist “Gesamtkunstwerk”. In doing so, they break down boundaries between man and machine, future and past, theater, visual art and virtual reality. The constantly rotating stage becomes the living space of a new kind of community. It cultivates a hieroglyphic language of movement and seems to live according to its own enigmatic rules. Inspired by the unconventional genius Albert Einstein, Philip Glass created a 20th century musical masterpiece that breaks all the rules of opera and follows no linear narrative structure. Repetitive patterns make time sensually tangible and put the audience into trance. The audience can move freely and experience the work individually.

other artists:

Performance/Dance – Suzan Boogaerdt, Tarren Johnson, Frank Willens, Tommy Cattin, Dominic Santia, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández
Basler Madrigalisten (conductor: Raphael Immoos) – Anna Miklashevich, Viola Molnar, Viviane Hasler (soprano), Barbara Schingnitz, Schoschana Kobelt, Leslie Leon (alto), Patrick Siegrist, Daniel Issa, Christopher Wattam (tenor), Othmar Sturm, Valerio Zanolli, Amir Tiroshi (bass)

Production of Theater Basel in cooperation with Berliner Festspiele and Wiener Festwochen

further information:

https://www.theater-basel.ch/de/einsteinonthebeach

With breathtaking emotional power, Michael Hersch and Stephanie Fleischmann retell the story of Emperor Nero and his wife Poppaea: the most powerful woman in the world 2000 years ago, a ruthless fight for one’s own goals, the burning of Rome and the end of a world. This opera premiere directed by Markus Bothe ventures on a red-hot journey to the dark side of Monteverdi’s “L’incoronazione di Poppea”. The Basel-based company “Piertzovanis Töws Architekten” turns the stage design into a statement for consciously dealing with the consequences of one’s own actions.

“POPPAEA is an opera about a woman whose desire is limitless; a woman who must endure many things and make her way through a world in which women are systematically silenced. The violence that prevails in this world is extreme. It begs the question: How far have we come? How little have we progressed?”

Michael Hersch / Stephanie Fleischmann

https://www.wienmodern.at/2021-hersch-fleischmann-poppaea-en-2172

Final concert of the composition competition “Phoenix Satellite 2020/2021”

For the fourth time, Ensemble Phoenix Basel held a biennial international composition workshop in the 2020/2021 season. In three preparatory modules – supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia – young composers at the beginning of their career get the opportunity to experiment with us as a professional specialist ensemble over a period of 18 months.

For the final fourth module – then as an integral part of the concert series of EPhB – two selected graduates of the preparatory phase are commissioned to compose a new work as a musical “commentary” on a central work of the 20th or 21st century. The new works are to “orbit” this composition, i.e. refer to it or contrast with it, as “satellites”. In 2019, the two satellites will revolve around one of the key works of the 20th century, “Vortex Temporum” by the French composer Gérard Grisey, who decisively influenced the musical style of “musique spectrale” (spectral music).

Composer Michael Jarrell’s music-theatrical work “Cassandre” is a monodrama for actress, ensemble and electronics based on the story “Cassandra” by Christa Wolf, a contemporary version of the Greek drama. The Swiss-French actress Marthe Keller inspired Jarrell to write this composition, which was premiered in French at the Théâtre du Châtelet Paris in 1994, directed by Peter Konwitschny. The German version was written for Anne Bennent and premiered at the Lucerne Festival in 1996, directed by Christoph Marthaler.

“Cassandre”

In Michael Jarrell’s oeuvre, “Cassandre” represents the culmination and synthesis of a first and extremely fruitful creative period, even though the choice of the work’s text was “dictated” to him by Christa Wolf, both musically and expressively. The figure of the Trojan priestess, reinterpreted by the German author, is torn between images of the past and impending catastrophe. Neither Wolf nor Jarrell himself want to draw us into the middle of the Trojan War: Cassandra speaks only of her memory about the events. At the beginning of the play, the worst has already happened. The pinnacle of lament – and revolt – lies not so much in a utopia of change or an attempt at a breakthrough, but rather in a kind of twilight. In a tiny space that borders on nothingness, as well as in the lightning-like certainty that precedes death, time condenses, closes, and loops back: in the intensity of feeling, the past becomes the present. The various moments of the drama do not present themselves in a causal chain that follows a realistic principle, but follow one another without transition, draw on one another and sound into one another, in a stream of consciousness that reveals the essential. The inner monologue is an attempt of clarification and an admission of failure at the same time, a combination of clear insight and melancholy. The whole work is, according to the composer, a “long coda”.

Philippe Albéra

Our “Blanko” projects are already legendary. On the one hand, we have been performing in this self-invented format for well over ten years, and on the other hand, the unusually intensive nature of the collaboration and engagement with two artists per season unites us in a particularly intense bond. Consciously not coming from the usual curriculum of a composer’s training, we bring together lateral entrants, “sonic artists” in the broadest sense, visual artists with a clear musical affinity, etc., with our expert ensemble members for electronic or amplified music.

This year we are planning our sound experiments with the Swiss drummer and sound innovator Lucas Niggli, who, throughout his career, has been an experimentalist and pioneer in the search for new musical worlds.

With the Swedish saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist Mats Gustafsson we were able to win a heavyweight of musical expressiveness. Gustafsson moves virtuously between the genres of free jazz, experimental rock, noise, electronica and dance theater.

The Ensemble Phoenix Basel has made it a cherished ritual to include the monumental late work by the American composer Morton Feldman “For Philip Guston” in its program every ten years. “Gare du Nord” opened with this work.

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

Two important chamber works of the “New Viennese School” are presented and contrasted in the opening concert of the 2015/16 season: Arnold Schoenberg’s “Chamber Symphony” op. 9 (1906) and Alban Berg’s “Chamber Concerto” (1924/25). Schoenberg’s “Chamber Symphony” is by no means finished with the first version for 15 instruments, which he completed in 1906. For decades he struggled again and again to find the right instrumentation, the right “size” of this symphony, but he also reacted in part to the famously not only enthusiastic reception of the piece by Viennese concert audiences. This symphony in a single movement lends itself to arrangements; Anton Webern also dared to do so and created a version for five instruments (the same instrumentation as in Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire”), which will be heard in the concert in a version revised by Jürg Henneberger. In Schoenberg’s eyes, the “Chamber Symphony No. 1”, which also has the tonal subtitle in E major, represents a real turning point. He hoped that a “way out of the confusing problems in which we young composers were entangled by the harmonic, formal, orchestral and emotional innovations of Richard Wagner” would be shown. The problems with the first as well as the “Chamber Symphony No. 2”, begun immediately thereafter, with which Schoenberg got completely stuck, shows that this way out was not so effortless after all.

Albans Berg’s “Chamber Concerto” (1924/25) is somewhat too often reduced to its character as a dedication work for Schoenberg’s fiftieth birthday in 1924. He had “wanted to show his brilliance,” one then only needs to read of Berg to suspect a false, over-ambitious gesture in the work. And one would do injustice to the wonderful and full music, whose complexity is undeniably dense and deep – Adorno called it “a kind of insatiability”. Of almost twice the duration of Schoenberg’s “Chamber Symphony”, Berg’s work has the layout of a double concerto for piano and violin. The formal details with which Berg refers to his friendships with Webern and Schoenberg are numerous and can be read in any appropriate CD booklet. More essential, even for Berg himself, is the “hidden” program that results in a synthesis step of the three movements – “Friendship, Love, World” Berg had originally outlined – and the two solo instruments. In the arrangement by Alban Berg and Jürg Henneberger played here, part of the original 13 wind instruments is replaced by a second piano.

Unlike Berg’s “Chamber Concerto”, there is no solo instrument here. Webern’s “Concerto” is rather a dialogue between nine instruments, all of which have both solo and chamber tasks.