Gare du Nord Archive – Ensemble Phoenix Basel

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

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

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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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

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

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

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.

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.

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 three world premieres are complemented by an ensemble piece by Chinese composer Wang Lu. «Backstory» has an open, intuitive form. Seemingly loose yet tightly wound blocks of sound rub up against buoyant grooves.

With great passion and dedication, EPhB regularly devotes itself to the New Viennese School,

The three pioneers of this style have had a decisive influence on European New Music. With his students Alban Berg and Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg created music that on the one hand is deeply rooted in Romanticism, and on the other – to quote Stefan George, whose poems were often and willingly set to music by the three composers – this music breathes “air from another planet”. The “dodecaphony” invented by Schoenberg – the twelve-tone technique – has influenced generations of composers and was the initial spark for further style-forming tendencies such as serial music.

In this program, songs for high soprano with ensemble are heard, framed by original instrumental pieces and arrangements of larger orchestral works, in keeping with the tradition of the “Verein für musikalische Privataufführungen” (Society for Private Musical Performances) founded by Schönberg in 1918 – which was dissolved again as early as 1921.

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)

Work commissioned by ELISION and Handspan Theatre & with financial assistance from the Performing Arts Board oft he Australia Council.

The work is dedicated to Daryl Buckley

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).

Anthropogenic debris
Retrograde inversion
Autocorrect
Transmission
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

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

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

In this program we deliberately look for musical roots in Renaissance and early Baroque music and their transposition in today’s time. Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino is one of todays composers, whose sound language has a very unique color, which is clearly based and involved with early music. Two of his works in which this focus is evident are heard in this program. One refers to Carlo Gesualdo, the other to Alessandro Stradella.

Our guitarist Maurizio Grandinetti also dealt with early music for decades. His approach, however, is more a translation of old music into our time; musical gestures and psychological emotional states, which are immanent in the music, are brought into our time in a new guise and unusually orchestrated, without touching the musical meaning – on the contrary.

The program is complemented by a commission to Basel based composer Lukas Langlotz, who also constantly deals with ancient and oldest music in a well-founded way in his compositional style. His new work will feature an “Arciorgano”, an organ built in Basel according to plans by the 16th-century Italian composer Nicola Vicentino, which allows 31 different pitches per octave.

About the arrangements:

Nikolaus Harnoncourt wrote in 1982: “The music of the past has become a foreign language through the progression of history, through its distance from the present and through its detachment from the context of its time. Individual aspects of a piece of music may be universally valid and timeless, but the message as such is bound to a particular time and can only be rediscovered if it is translated, as it were, into our present idiom.”

Nowadays there is a unique musical genre in which masterpieces of the past are reinterpreted by translating old masterpieces into a more or less contemporary language. With my arrangements, my intention is to look at the original music with my full expressiveness and intuition, going deep into the textual part. To this end, the vocal and textual parts have been left almost intact, but overlaid with a new instrumental framework.

The material of the arts has changed over the centuries, but their artistic content is recognized in our conscious perception of the present. Every time we evaluate art or listen to music, our current environment sets the standards for our artistic perception. It is up to us to decide how “original” the object must be in order to recognize it. As far as Renaissance restorations are concerned, we know that restorers at that time combined statues with the spirit of their own time, translating them into a new language that conveyed the energy typical of their era. The great art historian Cesare Brandi interpreted the Renaissance not as a revival of antiquity, but as a transfiguration of universal concepts, as part of a completely new creative process.

Today we find the music of the Renaissance and pre-baroque attractive mainly because of what the authors did not record in scores: the part reserved for improvisation and arrangement. Since the beginning of the 18th century, the habit was adopted that each composition corresponded to only one interpretation: the original one. Nothing was left to personal freedom. What would happen to occidental classical music if one tried to use a little Asian and African sensibilities, if one took into account “immaterial”, symbolic, ritual or religious values, instead of dealing with its historical authenticity?

After all, the performance of any piece of ancient music is a celebration of the absence of the original and its author. We have to decide whether to hide this absence or to fully acknowledge it.

Maurizio Grandinetti

The influence of the literary work by Irish poet James Joyce (1842-1941) on 20th century composers is eminent. Samuel Barber, John Cage (“Roaratorio”), Luigi Dallapiccola, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez (“3rd Piano Sonata”), Bernd Alois Zimmermann (“Antiphons”) and many others have been inspired by this forward-looking poet. Luciano Berio set three texts from his early poetry collection “Chamber Music” to music. Probably the most frequently used text is the final monologue of Molly Bloom from “Ulysses”. This is also the base for the works “Skin” and “O, Yes & I” by English composer Rebecca Saunders. The world premiere will be a new work by the German composer Matthias Heep. His composition refers to Joyce’s last novel “Finnegans Wake”.

Sebastian Gottschick has stepped in at short notice for the conductor Jürg Henneberger, who has fallen ill.

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.

Due to the Covid crisis, the concerts took place as online streams.

Lithuanian composer Arturas Bumšteinas writes a loose sequence of 40 short compositions for EPhB based on the legendary “Vexations” by Erik Satie, which, according to a cryptically formulated playing instruction, which are to be repeated 840 times. The compositions take Satie’s material as their starting point and virtually “de-compose” the work. The source serves as a “quarry” or “source of inspiration” for miniatures in a wide variety of instrumental combinations.

Due to the Covid crisis, the concerts took place as online streams.

CANCELLED DUE TO THE CURRENT CORONA CRISIS!

At the center of the program is the double concerto “Fénix (naturaleza visible)” for two guitars and ensemble, which Maldonado wrote for the guitarist Pablo Márquez, who teaches in Basel, and the guitarist of the EPhB Maurizio Grandinetti. His work “Oltre” is a tribute to his teacher Donatoni.

The Mexican composer Javier Torres Maldonado studied in Milan with Franco Donatoni and Ivan Fedele. His music is based on the overtone spectrum of a sound and is extremely complex due to the superimposition of various melodic and rhythmic layers. Maldonado compares his musical language with the pictorial language of Piranesi and M. C. Escher, which through its imagined perspective creates an illusory world that not only allows an individual point of view, but virtually challenges it. The ear is meant to focus on different spatial and temporal planes like a rotating lens.

The program is complemented by two new works by Basel-based composer Balz Trümpy.

Instead of sending another online stream out, we produce an LP with the new pieces of this program.

The central work of this Polish-Swiss program in co-production with “Culturescapes 2019 – Poland” is the concerto “Con Clavi III” by Ryszard Gabryś for harpsichord, double bass and ensemble, created for this occasion. This world premiere is framed by two works by Polish composers Bolesław Szabelski and Paweł Szymański. The EPhB creates a Swiss reference with a quintet for piano with winds and strings by the Polish-Swiss composer Constantin Regamey, whose unjustly almost forgotten music opens the program. The musical realization of a graphic composition by the Polish-Israeli composer, musicologist, graphic artist and painter Roman Haubenstock-Ramati closes the evening.

Jürg Henneberger

This concert is a tribute Rudolf Kelterborn. He was director of the Basel Music Academy from 1983 to 1994. His composition class included the two younger Basel composers in this program. We have enjoyed a creative collaboration with all three composers for many years. In the new composition “Encore” Kelterborn sets texts by Georg Rudolf Weckerlin, Georg Trakl, Erika Burkart and Johann Wolfgang Goethe as well as Japanese haikus to music. The cycle is dedicated to “Jürg Henneberger – in gratitude”.

The compositional work of the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis is an important pillar for the music of the 20th century and has its fixed place in our programs. It is also a source of inspiration for the Swiss composer and cellist Martin Jaggi. His composition “Har” is the first part of a cycle of five works about the oldest advanced civilizations of this earth.

Jean Barraqué is one of the “great unknowns” of the French avant-garde, whohad a difficult time throughout his life alongside Pierre Boulez. This program places one of his most important late works next to two early works by Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, who at the beginning of their compositional work were among the main representatives of “serialism”, a compositional technique that can be described as a consistent further development of the twelve-tone technique.

It is an exciting listening experience to hear a dodecaphonic work by Anton Webern, a representative of the “New Viennese School”, alongside strictly serial works in the same program.

In 2016/17 EPhB conducted for the second time a biennial international composition workshop. In three preparatory modules – these 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 the period of 18 months.

For the final fourth module – then as 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 are to “orbit” this composition as “satellites”, i.e. they are to refer to it or contrast with it. In 2017, the two satellites will revolve around the “Chamber Concerto”, one of the major works of Hungarian composer György Ligeti.

Originally from Iran, Elnaz Seyedi studied composition in Bremen with Younghi Pagh-Paan, in Basel with Caspar Johannes Walter, and at the Folkwang University of the Arts Essen with Günter Steinke. With her work “Detaillierter Blick”, she illuminates and reflects on various mood states of Ligeti’s masterpiece without quoting it directly.

The composer and saxophonist Kevin Juillerat, who comes from French-speaking Switzerland, studied saxophone in Lausanne with Pierre-Stéphane Meugé and in Basel with Marcus Weiss. At the same time he studied in Geneva with Michael Jarrell and Luis Naon and in Basel with Georg Friedrich Haas composition. His new work “TOMBEAU” makes concrete use of individual “building blocks” from Ligeti’s “Chamber Concerto”, placing them in a new context and developing them further until, shortly before the end, they culminate in a short literal quotation that breaks off abruptly and leads to an open ending.

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.