Explanatory Note:
The works listed in both the Core Composers and Featured Composers sections follow a consistent presentation format designed to make navigation and listening as clear and practical as possible.
Each entry begins with the title of the work. When necessary, the instrumentation or formation is indicated, particularly for works whose title alone does not make this immediately evident.
This is followed by the year of composition and, where applicable, the dates of later revisions. The approximate duration of the work is then given in minutes.
After this information, the listening source is indicated (Spotify, YouTube, etc.). Following the slash are the performers corresponding to the version available on that platform. In many cases, especially in contemporary music, the interpretation plays an essential role in the listening experience, which is why the performers are systematically identified.
A typical entry therefore follows this structure: Title of work (formation)-composition date, revision date(s)-duration -source / performers
Example: SQ 2-1983, rev. 1987 -18’ -YouTube / Arditti Quartet
The purpose of this system is to provide concise but precise information, allowing readers and listeners to identify both the work itself and the exact interpretation being referenced.
Core composers List Alphabetical
10 John Luther Adams
8 Mark Andre
2 Pierre Boulez
7 Unsuk Chin
6 Chaya Czernowin
18 Morton Feldman
15 Brian Ferneyhough
16 Georg Friedrich Haas
5 Clara Iannotta
14 Helmut Lachenmann
1 György Ligeti
3 Zibuokle Martinaityte
17 Tristan Murail
9 Gabriela Ortiz
4 Hector Parra
12 Giacinto Scelsi
13 Ying Wang
11 Iannis Xenakis
1-György Ligeti -1923-2006 -Hungary
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Piano
The music of György Ligeti is defined by a radical rethinking of musical time and texture. Rather than organizing sound through melody and harmony in the traditional sense, Ligeti constructs dense, continuously shifting fields in which individual lines lose their identity and merge into a larger sonic fabric.
His concept of micropolyphony allows for extreme complexity without perceptual overload: countless independent voices move at different speeds and intervals, yet the listener perceives a unified, evolving mass. This produces a paradoxical effect—static on the surface, yet internally in constant motion.
Ligeti’s later works introduce greater rhythmic articulation and mechanical precision, often drawing on complex polyrhythms and non-Western influences. Even here, however, the underlying principle remains the same: music as a system in which micro-level activity generates macro-level form, without reliance on traditional thematic development.
1 Lontano -1967- 12’ -Spotify/BPO-Nott
Marc’s Note: One of the composer’s most famous works for grand orchestra, in
which traditional melody and rhythm recede in favour of evolving sound masses
moving through space.
2 Piano Concerto -1985-1988 -23’ -Spotify/Aimard-Schönberg Ens.-De Leeuw
Marc’s Note: Ligeti struggled for years with this five-movement concerto,
which is saturated with aural illusions and sparkling textures. Fractal
thinking informed aspects of the work’s structure and contributes to its
constantly transforming character.
3 Violin Concerto -1989-1993 -28’ -Spotify/Faust-Les Siècles-Roth
Marc’s Note: This wild and extreme violin concerto is full of outlandish
timbres, abrupt swerves and expressive extremes. Ligeti pushes his imagination
to the hilt and achieves a real kaleidoscope of sounds and techniques.
4 SQ 2 -1968- 20’- Spotify/Quatuor Diotima
After four nervous, brutal and tumultuous movements, we are treated to one
of the most delicate finales in chamber music.
5 Etudes-Book 2 -1988-1994 -23’ -Spotify/Aimard
Ligeti opens this book with an etude that alludes to the harmonic and
timbral world of Debussy and gamelan. Entrelacs and der Zauberlehrling feature
dizzyingly fast note repetitions, while Vertige, l’Escalier du Diable and
Infinite Column refer to spiral phenomena in nature, man-made objects and
sound.
6 Volumina -1961-1962 -16’- YT/Susteck
Volumina for solo organ develops note clusters that form large sound blocks.
Traditional melody and harmony recede as the composer focuses on sound colour
and texture.
7 Lux Aeterna -1966 -10’ -YT/Capella Amsterdam-Reuss
This choral piece sets the Latin text of the Requiem Mass. Through
micropolyphonic writing and subtly shifting pulse, Ligeti creates a shimmering
and unsettling effect.
8 Requiem -1963-1965 -26’ -Spotify/Stein-Van Reisen-London Voices-BPO-Nott
Only three segments of the traditional Latin Mass (Introit, Kyrie and the
combined Dies Irae-Lacrimosa sequence) are set. The composer was strongly
influenced by painters such as Memling, Brueghel, Bosch and Dürer.
The highlight is the Dies Irae with its hysterical, dramatic and
unrestrained character.
2-Pierre Boulez-1925-2016-France
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Vocal
Boulez’s early work is marked by an uncompromising extension of serial principles, aiming at a total organization of musical parameters. This period is characterized by a high degree of abstraction, where the structural system governs the behavior of every element with maximum rigor.
From the 1960s onward, his approach evolves toward greater flexibility. While the underlying structures remain precise, they are no longer imposed in a strictly deterministic way. Instead, Boulez introduces forms that can unfold along multiple paths, allowing for variation, mobility, and a more immediate perceptual clarity.
This shift does not represent a break, but a transformation: control is not abandoned, but redistributed. The later works achieve a balance between structural discipline and sonic fluidity, resulting in a music that is more transparent in its surface, yet no less rigorous in its construction.
1 Rituel in Memoriam Maderna for
orchestra-1974-1975-25’-Spotify/BBC SO-Boulez
Marc’s Note: Rituel unfolds at a solemn pace with sad, mournful tones.
The work demonstrates how Boulez’s serial thinking can convey genuine emotion.
Percussion and woodwind instruments dominate the score, and only some of the
orchestral sections are active at any given time. We move from one orchestral
group to another, exploring their timbres, while the melodic material primarily
serves to sustain an atmosphere of deep sorrow.
2 Répons for ensemble, orchestra and
electronics-1981-1984-42’-YT/EIC-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
This is post-serial Boulez at its best.
Thanks to real time electronics, the composer is able to associate synthetic
and instrumental sounds with remarkable precision. He creates new timbres and
distributes the sound in space, producing true spatial music and opening
original acoustic dimensions and colours. Répons is a dazzling achievement and
stands at the very heart of late Boulez.
3 Livre pour cordes (from Livre pour quatuor)-2017
version-56’-Spotify/Diotima Quartet
Marc’s Note:
“Work in progress” is one of Boulez’s trademarks, and Livre pour quatuor, his
only string quartet, is a perfect example of a work that took decades to reach
its final form. The excellent composer Philippe Manoury completed the missing
fourth movement in 2017.
The quartet is a brilliant and fundamental exercise in rigorous serialism on
both harmonic and rhythmic levels. Abrupt and constant changes in timbre, very
extended techniques such as sul ponticello, col legno and pizzicato, and subtle
contrasts follow one another, ranging from dry austerity to a nearly
improvisatory suppleness. A major work of the twentieth century.
4 Éclat for ensemble-1966-1970-27’-Spotify/EIC-Boulez
Marc’s Note: In his early aleatory period Boulez sought to combine controlled
chance with the constructive discipline of serial composition. Éclat continues
this exploration. Pitches, tempo and dynamics are predetermined, but the
conductor decides which motif to signal next.
The ensemble is divided into two groups: instruments whose sound dies away
quickly unless trilled, and instruments capable of sustaining sound. Boulez
weaves a luminous web of timbres through the interaction of these two families.
5 Messagesquisse for 7 cellos-1976-9’-Spotify/Queyras-Ensemble de
Violoncelles de Paris
Marc’s Note:
This short piece is dedicated to the composer’s friend Paul Sacher and contains
personal messages symbolically encoded, almost like a musical sketch.
Jean-Guihen Queyras is in total command of the solo part and carries the score
convincingly. A very slow simmering opening section is followed by a very fast
and dense central passage. Quivering sounds and sparse notes initiate the final
section, whose very rapid closing fragment ends the piece in brilliant fashion.
6 …explosante-fixe… for MIDI flute, two flutes, ensemble and
electronics-1991-1993-35’-Spotify/EIC-Boulez
Marc’s Note:
Boulez fully unleashes his imagination in this powerful work built around the
MIDI flute and two additional flutes, accompanied by the EIC. Boulez’s long
time assistant Andrew Gerzso oversees the crucial electroacoustic realisation,
and the electronic amplification allows the MIDI flute to cut through very
dense passages. The electronics generate swirling clouds of sound in constant
transformation.
7 Sur Incises for 3 pianos, 3 harps and 3
percussionists-1996-1998-39’-YT/EIC-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
Boulez creates a remarkable and highly distinctive sound world with this
unusual instrumental combination. Glittering brilliance and contrapuntal
intricacies abound, yet the composer keeps every line clean and perfectly
transparent, exactly as one would expect from a composer of such rigor and
control.
8 Pli selon pli for soprano and ensemble-1989
version-69’-Spotify/Schäfer-EIC-Boulez
Marc’s Note:
Pli selon pli is based on a line by the French poet Mallarmé describing how
mist gradually disperses to reveal the topology of an imagined space.
The work is overtly theatrical in its large orchestral panels, Don and Tombeau,
which frame the three Improvisations. A restrained sensuality inhabits the
soprano line while the listener is immersed in an extraordinarily refined
instrumental palette. The composer regarded the 1989 version as the definitive
form of the work.
3-Zibuokle Martinaityte-1973-Lithuania
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Vocal
In the music of Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, sound unfolds as a sustained, immersive environment in which transformation occurs gradually and almost imperceptibly. Rather than articulating clear contrasts or directional development, her works often remain within a single sonic state that is continuously modulated from within.
The emphasis lies on luminosity and resonance. Harmonic fields are stretched over long durations, allowing micro-variations in color, density, and intensity to become the primary carriers of form. Time is experienced not as progression, but as suspension.
Despite this apparent stasis, the music is carefully controlled. Subtle shifts accumulate, leading to large-scale changes that are only fully perceptible in retrospect. The result is a listening experience that requires attention to detail at the threshold of audibility, where the boundary between sound and silence becomes structurally significant.
1 Saudade for orchestra-2019-17’-Spotify/Lithuanian Nat SO-Slekyte
Marc’s Note:
In Portuguese Saudade means a deep emotional state of nostalgic or profound
melancholic longing for an absent something or someone whom one loves.
In Martinaityte’s experience this notion symbolizes the stratum of multiple
yearnings that started layering with the blue period of her father’s death and
her immigration to the USA.
Her writing is expressively at her most ambiguous in this piece.
There are plenty of subtle, shifting colours and undulating shifting lines
that give the impression of a rippling surface with tensions roiling just
beneath.
Three terrifying climaxes suddenly drop off, lending the piece an aura of
harrowing mystery.
Her harmonic language is powerful, yet economical.
Slowly evolving chords accumulate density and tension until they erupt in
sudden orchestral changes.
2 Cello Concerto-Sielunmaisema-2019-35’-YT/Backus-Klaipeda Chamber
Orch-Rohde
Marc’s Note:
Sielunmaisema is a Finnish word, the equivalent of a sound-landscape, a
particular place that a person carries deep in the heart and returns to often
in memory. It immediately makes you feel at home.
Martinaityte is particularly interested by memory, identity, migration and
sonic beauty.
She uses the four seasons as four movements and a cherished memory of her
early life in Lithuania. There is nostalgia for the past and for the landscape
that is no longer the same due to global warming.
She moved to the USA as a young woman and has therefore two cultural
identities: Lithuanian and American.
She did not aim to compose a traditional cello concerto. Instead, the cello
behaves like a guide through the sonic landscape, sometimes emerging from the
orchestral dialogue, sometimes dissolving back into it.
The relationship is closer to a continuous conversation of timbres than to a
solo-tutti opposition.
The cello feels like an inner voice, while the orchestra acts like a
surrounding emotional field.
3 Percussion Concerto-Nunc fluens, nunc stans
-2020-16’-YT/Giunter-Lithuanian Chamber Orch-Kaliunis
Marc’s Note:
The title originates from a quote by the Roman philosopher Boethius. It
means: The Now that passes creates time, The Now that remains creates eternity.
These two different models of Now resonate with the Covid period. Only the
Now remained, which contradicted the ancient truths of philosophers.
The piece is a kind of diptych where both parts are performed without a
break.
The flowing time is followed by the standstill.
Vibraphone, crotales, gongs, bowed cymbal and a tubular bell constitute the
percussion complement performed by one percussionist.
They allow the music to whisper, murmur, buzz, toll and ring.
Instead of rhythmic virtuosity, the percussion writing emphasizes resonance
and colour, transforming metallic instruments into sources of sustained sound.
4 Ex Tenebris Lux for string orchestra-2021-24’-Spotify/Lithuanian Chamber
Orch-Variakojis
Marc’s Note:
From Darkness to Light was composed during the covid pandemic and symbolizes
a hopeful thought amid crisis and uncertainty.
The music is meant as a guide through a prolonged zone of darkness,
ultimately bringing the listener to light and allowing him/her to experience
it.
Martinaityte is a textural magician and she proves it again in this piece.
Multiple gradations of darkness are explored through the density of musical
textures. There is dramatic substance in the merest dynamic shifts and changes
of texture.
A kind of monolithic sound is created by the individual instruments and the
individualized lines are only differentiated when the state of light is
reached.
5 Solastalgia for ensemble-2020-13’-YT/Ensemble Synaesthesis-Variakojis
Marc’s Note:
The portmanteau title derives from the concepts of solace and desolation as
the suffix algia denotes suffering.
To Martinaityte it means that you can feel homesick although you are at home
but in different conditions because of environmental changes and global
warming.
Musically the piece unfolds as a fragile and unsettled soundscape.
Soft sustained tones and delicate instrumental colours create the impression
of a landscape that is slowly changing before our ears.
Nothing dramatic happens, yet a subtle unease permeates the entire piece, as
if the environment itself had become slightly unfamiliar.
Martinaite avoids clear melodic lines. Instead, she builds the music from
hovering harmonic fields, whispering gestures and faint pulses that seem to
appear and disappear like distant memories.
The ensemble often sounds suspended in time, creating a strange beauty that
is both comforting and unsettling.
The result is music that feels introspective and quietly haunting, capturing
the paradox of solastalgia: the sorrow of witnessing the transformation of a
place that once felt stable and eternal.
6 In Search of lost Beauty for piano, violin and
cello-2016-69’-Spotify/Balkstyte-Rupaite-Petrikiene-Jacunskas
Marc’s Note:
It is a piano trio with electronics and the electronics have pre-recorded
the same instruments as the live instruments.
The mixture of live and pre-recorded instruments creates a slightly blurred
sonic perspective.
When Martinaityte composed the piece, she was in search of lost time, a bit
like Proust. She started to pay attention to small details of the everyday and
noticed how beautiful everything becomes when you pay attention to it. She
realised attention creates the beauty.
Ten Sections are united into a structural coherent whole, as an invitation
to see beauty in familiar phenomena (found in nature, the everyday and art)
which usually go unnoticed.
They teach us to slow down and are a reaction against speedy screen images,
that constantly flood us.
This allows us to operate less automatically and discover true moments of
being.
The composer considered the work to be a breakthrough piece, a real turning
point.
7 Hadal Zone-2020-2021-64’-Spotify/Ensemble Synaesthesis
Marc’s Note:
The composer loves nature and particularly the silence or rather the
microscopic sound layers in nature that are a welcome respite from the
aggressive sound of urban life.
Hadal Zone is a journey through the deepest depths of the ocean. In fact,
the five different layers of the ocean are the five movements of the piece.
It is scored for low instruments-bass clarinet, tuba, cello, contrabass,
piano and electronics.
The instrumental music she composed is slow and fosters introspection and
serenity.
Hadal Zone refers to the deepest zone of the ocean, but the entire work is
about ocean zones being traversed vertically. It is a journey during which
there will be silence, muted sounds and some growls that could have been
uttered by ocean monsters.
8 Aletheia-2022-15’-Spotify/Latvian Radio Choir-Klava
Marc’s Note:
For her vocal music, Martinaityte has made the deliberate choice not to use
words, but only vowels of which there are plenty in her Lithuanian language.
She does not want to be limited by the text, because it would define the
meaning and make it narrower.
The audience can fully hear how the voices are combining, how time flows and
what happens harmonically.
One can sense echoes of the complex layering of High Renaissance choral
music, but also harmonies that are close to Ligeti’s sound-world.
Aletheia means “uncovering of the truth” in Greek and particularly the truth
we are afraid to face.
The piece was influenced by the war in Ukraine and the composer herself was
inspired by the importance of the human voice. Voice is the first and last
instrument we have in our lifetime. This thought brings an almost sacred
dimension to the voice as an expression of life between birth and death.
9 Togetherness for piano-2007-2008-7’-YT/Cahill
Marc’s Note:
I could not resist offering you an encore in the form of a moving piano
piece, as the piano is Martinaityte’s instrument.
Togetherness is the first movement of Heights and Depths of Love, that is
unfinished up to now.
It starts with sumptuous, layered sounds which morph into a mesmerizing
massive buildup middle-section and ends with a small impressionistic flourish.
4-Hector Parra-1976-Spain
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Keyboard, Opera
Hector Parra’s music unfolds at the intersection of physicality, abstraction, and speculative thought. His work is driven by a deep engagement with scientific models, particularly from physics and cosmology, not as external references, but as generative forces shaping form, texture and dramaturgy. Sound in Parra’s music behaves like matter under pressure: it expands, fractures, and reorganizes in constantly shifting states of energy.
At the same time, his output reveals a strong theatrical instinct. Whether in chamber works or large-scale operas, Parra constructs immersive sonic environments where perception itself becomes unstable. The listener is drawn into processes that feel both rigorously structured and viscerally immediate, often navigating between microscopic detail and overwhelming mass.
What distinguishes Parra is this dual anchoring: an intellectual framework of rare ambition combined with a tactile, almost sculptural approach to sound. His music does not illustrate ideas; it enacts them, placing the listener inside evolving systems where tension, transformation, and density are the primary expressive agents.
1 Inscape for orchestra-2017-2018-30’-YT/Orch Nat Lille-Bloch
Marc’s Note:
Inscape is conceived for sixteen soloists embedded within a large orchestra
and electronics. Parra imagines the piece as a psychoacoustic expedition that
carries the listener far beyond familiar perception, into a hypothetical
journey inside a black hole.
The work opens in a fragile sonic environment built from tiny sound
particles. Instrumental gestures, faint vocal-like timbres and even the
presence of the audience seem to merge into a single organic field.
Gradually the orchestral mass gains momentum. Electronics interact
increasingly with the instrumental soloists and propel the music toward zones
of extreme density and energy.
Musical space and time begin to warp and the delicate opening textures
mutate into turbulent and distorted forces as the listener approaches the
acoustic equivalent of an event horizon.
Electronic spectra resembling gravitational waves sweep through the hall.
Their changing densities and spatial movement reshape the perception of the
surrounding acoustic space, which seems to expand and contract as if influenced
by cosmic forces.
After passing through this violent sonic threshold, the music suggests a
transition toward an unknown realm, like travelling through a wormhole toward a
new universe. The nature of this new space remains mysterious and Parra leaves
it to the music itself to hint at what might exist beyond.
2 Wilde-Suite for orchestra-2015-8’-Soundcloud/OBC-Ono
Marc’s Note:
Wilde is originally a play by the Austrian playwright Händl Klaus which
Parra adopted first to opera and then to a suite for orchestra.
The plot is the story of a young doctor, working for Médecins sans
Frontières, who returned home by train after a difficult experience in a
Moldovan prison. He ends up in the wrong station, in a deserted city where he
meets two savage brothers and accompanies them to their home.
A stifling spiral ensues in which the brothers’ family abuses their guest.
The physical and moral degradation that a human being may endure is the
cornerstone of the work and invites us to reflect on important issues in
today’s society.
The Suite is a form of synthesis of the opera as Parra brings the spirit of
Wilde to the concert hall with its claustrophobic tensions and its abysses, but
also with its moments of hope that come close to tenderness.
3 La Mort I la Primavera for ensembles-2021-43’-YT/EIC-Leguay & Remix
Ensemble-Casa de Musica-Rundel
Marc’s Note:
In this large-scale tone poem Parra employs two ensembles conducted
independently, creating a layered narrative structure unfolding across six
movements.
The works takes inspiration from Mercé Rodoreda’s unfinished and
posthumously published novel La Mort I la Primavera. The story depicts a
nightmarish society governed by cruel traditions and constant fear, seen
through the eyes of an adolescent searching for escape.
Parra translates the oppressive atmosphere of the novel into music filled
with ritualistic violence and permanent tension. Dark instrumental colours
dominate, particularly through the prominent role of the cello and double bass
whose weight becomes increasingly decisive in the final movements.
Against this bleak environment the flute occasionally introduces moments of
fragile lyricism that momentarily relieve the tension.
The result resembles a ritual spectacle: a kind of sacred dance, a ballet
without dancers or an opera without voices. Its relentless rhythmic drive and
elemental energy can evoke distant echoes of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
4 Limite les Rêves au-delà for cello and
electronics-2017-71’-Spotify/Deforce
Marc’s Note:
Parra’s interest in astrophysics once again provides the conceptual
framework for this monumental work for cello and electronics.
The piece functions as a large-scale psychoacoustic exploration that seeks
to push musical perception beyond ordinary sensory limits. Throughout the work
a continuous dialogue unfolds between the natural resonance of the cello and
electronically transformed sound.
These interactions range from confrontation to gradual fusion, creating what
can be heard as a kind of cosmological symphony in which acoustic and
electronic energies intertwine.
Cellist Arne Deforce confronts the immense expressive demands of the score,
generating an extraordinary range of variations and textures from the
instrument. Sound engineer Thomas Goepfer extends these gestures
electronically, amplifying their impact and projecting them into a vast sonic
space.
The music ultimately becomes an invitation to experience the immense und
untamed forces of the universe through sound.
5 SQ 3-Aracné-2015-14’-Soundcloud/Qt Tana
Marc’s Note:
In Aracné Parra draws inspiration from Velazquez’s painting Las Hilanderas,
transforming the visual imagery of spinning threads into a highly theatrical
musical process.
The quartet begins in a relatively traditional manner but gradually
undergoes a striking transformation. The musicians themselves become part of
the metaphor as their instruments and gestures evoke the activity of spinning
and weaving.
To achieve this, each performer attaches a silk thread to the instrument,
effectively creating an additional vibrating element that acts like a fifth
string. This unusual device produces an astonishing palette of sounds: bird
calls, buzzing swarms, distant thunder, creaking mechanisms or galloping
rhythms.
The silk thread is not merely a theatrical effect but an integral component
of the compositional idea, enabling the Tana Quartet to generate extremely
dense timbral textures and saturated sonic colours.
6 String Trio for violin, viola and cello-2006-11’-YT/Ensemble Recherche
Marc’s Note:
The extreme sonorous plasticity of the string trio, the inheritance of the
variation and a certain structural freedom, as well as a clear tendency towards
polyphony (perpetual friction of the three sonorous fluxes) have inspired Parra
to compose music with an internal organization that relies on different types
of energy which this formation can make us feel.
String Trio tries to erase the frontier between the gesture of the
instruments and the interior expression, between the acoustic space and time as
perceived by the audience.
Parra was also inspired by Lisa Randall, a professor in physics, whose model
posits a universe with five dimensions, which has encouraged him to open up a
new dimension of the psycho-acoustic space.
The transformation and spatialization of the instrumental sounds transport
the listener to states of high sonorous energies.
7 Au Coeur de l’Oblique for piano-2016-2017-22’-YT/Gentet
Marc’s Note:
This piano work pays tribute to the architects Claude Parent and Paul
Virilio, whose theory of the “fonction oblique” challenged traditional
architectural space through the use of inclined planes. Their ideas culminated
in the striking design of the Sainte-Bernadette-du-Banlay church.
Parra transposes this architectural thinking into musical form. The piece
examines how musical structures can behave when stability is replaced by a
sense of tilt and imbalance.
In the first movement the pianist extracts energy from dense chords using
unconventional physical contact with the instrument, including nails, palms and
fingertips. The accumulated tension gradually pushes the performer toward a
psychological threshold.
The second part reflects the massive sobriety of Parent’s church. The tempo
relaxes and the pianist combines conventional keyboard playing with sounds
produced directly on the strings.
The work ultimately accelerates toward a fluid and undulating piano language
of considerable virtuosity.
8 L’Aube assaillie for cello and electronics-18’-Spotify/Akerberg
Marc’s Note:
The study of new concepts in physics, his passion for painting, contemporary
dance and especially the collaboration with performers have encouraged Parra to
sculpt a clear cut, more varied and more polyphonic language for strings.
L’ Aube assaillie for cello and electronics was composed at Ircam where
Parra worked closely together with the French choreographer Frédéric Lescure as
the music was meant to accompany a ballet.
The composer has conceived a music, wherein the function of the different
temporal fluxes produces an energetic impulse, which the listener can strongly
perceive at any moment.
The audience is maintained in a very strong state of concentration, which
lets its ears vibrate with the most subtle temporal gradations.
The cello sound allows for an incomparable listening possibility of
movement, as dance is at the same time complement and development of the
gesture of the performer.
9 Hypermusic Prologue for soprano, baritone and
ensemble-2008-2009-64’-YT/Ellett-Bobby-EIC-Power
Marc’s Note:
Hypermusic Prologue is an opera for soprano, baritone and an ensemble of ten
musicians.
The work explores ideas from theoretical physics concerning additional
spatial dimensions.
Parra collaborated directly with physicist Lisa Randall, whose book Warped
passages inspired the project: Randall herself wrote the libretto.
The drama revolves around two characters whose attitudes towards the
universe diverge. The soprano seeks to explore higher dimensions and unknown
realities, while the baritone initially prefers the security of a familiar and
static world.
As their relationship develops, he is ultimately compelled to follow her
into the hypothetical fifth dimension in order to preserve their bond.
Musically Parra represents these extra dimensions through an expanded sonic
language involving electronic processing, vocal distortions and extended
techniques. The shifting textures and shimmering electronic sounds convey both
the tension between the two characters and their eventual reconciliation.
5-Clara Iannotta-1983-Italy
Primary Forces: Orchestra, Ensemble, Chamber
Clara Iannotta’s music unfolds in a world where sound is treated less as a vehicle for gesture than as a fragile material that retains memory. Her works often revolve around traces: what remains after an action, what lingers after sound has nearly disappeared.
Across her output, one encounters a consistent attention to resonance, decay and transformation. Musical ideas rarely develop through contrast or dramatic opposition, instead, they mutate slowly, as if observed under a microscope. This creates a sense of suspended time, where past and present coexist rather than replace one another.
Her frequent use of altered instruments, unconventional objects and noise-based techniques is not decorative. It serves to reveal the physical substance of sound: its grain, instability and vulnerability. Pitch and noise are placed on equal footing, forming hybrid textures that feel at once intimate and elusive.
Literary references, especially to Dorothy Molloy, provide evocative starting points, but Iannotta avoids direct illustration. Instead, her music inhabits emotional or perceptual states: disorientation, absence, transformation. These are not narrated, but sustained over time, often without resolution.
A recurring feature of her work is the avoidance of climax. Rather than moving toward culmination, her pieces tend to dissipate, thin out, or live behind residues: like imprints that persist after the event has passed.
Within this aesthetic, each work can be understood as a different perspective on the same underlying concerns.
1 Dead Wasps in the Jam-Jar II for string orchestra, objects and sine waves-2016-15’-YT/Munich Chamber Orch-Schuldt
Originally conceived within a project interweaving new works with Partita no 1 in B minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, this piece takes its point of departure from the Double of the Corrente, though only in a distant, almost ghostly way. Clara Iannotta stretches and distorts the underlying gestures, surrounding them with glissandi, fragile noise layers and unstable textures.
The evocative title comes from the poetry of Dorothy Molloy, yet the connection remains indirect. Rather than illustrating the poem, the music seems to hover around its atmosphere.
In this expanded version for string orchestra, the material of the original solo piece grows outward. Instrumental sound is enriched by sine waves and unusual objects: bird-call devices, bowed synthetic materials and resonant surfaces. The result is kind of magnified sonic organism, where each gesture lingers and dissolves into its own resonance.
2 Moult for chamber orchestra-2018-2019-17’-YT/WDR SO-Wendeberg
In Moult, Iannotta draws on the biological process by which spiders shed their exoskeleton in order to grow. This act of renewal leaves behind a fragile imprint of the former body, creating a coexistence between what was and what is becoming.
The orchestra is imagined as undergoing a similar transformation.
Muscal material appears to slough off layers, while traces of earlier states remain embedded in the texture. The piece unfolds in a suspended temporality, where past and present overlap rather than replace one another.
Sound seems to carry memory within it: gestures are not erased but persist as shadows, giving the work a sense of continuous metamorphosis rather than linear progression.
3 Strange Bird-No longer navigating by a star for guitar and orchestra-2022-14’-YT/Santorsa-ORF Radio SO Vienna-Alsop
The piece is part of the cycle inspired by the Irish poet Dorothy Molloy.
This time the poet talks about the fact of feeling strange in our skin, as if there was an empty space in our body.
It is if one has completely lost a sense of direction.
Iannotta does not try to search for a new direction, but tries to inhabit the empty space and to find a reason to live in it.
Her goal is to fill the empty space with music.
Molloy uses the metaphor of the directionless, strange, flapping bird whose distant echoes indicate that he is lost.
The piece introduces the movement of the bird drifting from place to place without ever landing or finding its destination.
This is also the impression the audience gets from the music with its constant, relentless but subtle movement towards an unknown destination.
4 Piano Concerto-The purple fuchsia bled upon the ground-2023-2024-17’-YT/Aimard-WDR SO-Schwarz
Iannotta processes the death of her mother in this piano concerto and it is no wonder that the audience hears horrendous sounds and acoustic violence, similar to animalistic menace, which are an outlet for the composer’s grief.
She wanted the music to bleed and the dedicatee and soloist Aimard produced clusters, which splashed into virulent sound surfaces.
The work explores the physicality of sound with an unusual orchestration, including electric guitar, Midi piano and accordion, accompanied by electronic passages which sometimes evoke bird songs.
The pianist navigates between pounded low registers and strings, that are plucked to the limit of audibility.
The music has a cinematic touch and alternates intense passages with electronic interventions in dynamic sequences which offer the audience no respite.
Iannotta’s piece is very experimental and creates a laboratory of new possibilities.
5 Il Colore dell’Ombra for ensemble-2010-12’-YT/Longleash
In this early ensemble work, Iannotta takes inspiration from the refined colour palette of Maurice ravel, particularly his chamber writing, but redirects it toward a more tactile and material exploration of sound.
The instruments are subtly altered: strings are detuned or damped; the piano is prepared at specific points and bow techniques are diversified. These interventions do not aim at effect for its own sake, but rather at revealing the physical substance of sound itself: its grain, resistance and fragility.
Microtonal inflections and delicate articulations create a constantly shifting spectrum of timbres. Instead of a stable harmonic field, the listener encounters a living surface of sound, where colour emerges from the interaction between gesture and material.
6 Paw Marks in wet Cement for piano, two percussionists and amplified ensemble-2015-2018-Spotify/Latchoumia-L’Instant donné-Zielinski
The title, taken from a line by Dorothy Malone, evokes the idea of a trace left behind: a fragile inscription of something no longer present. This notion of imprint shapes the entire piece.
Although the instrumentation recalls the tradition of the piano concerto, Iannotta deliberately avoids hierarchy. The piano, often prepared and shared between the soloist and percussionists, blends into the ensemble rather than dominating it.
The opening introduces a field of unstable materials: sliding strings, muted piano sonorities and unconventional brass colours. A more abstract central section reworks these elements, dispersing their identity.
In the final part, instead of building toward a climax, the music withdraws. Light, almost playful sounds: bird calls, friction drum appear like residual echoes.
What remains is not resolution, but the lingering impression of what has passed.
7 Earthing-Dead Wasps for SQ-2020-13’-YT/Jack Qt
This string quartet reflects Iannotta’s affinity with the aesthetic of Helmut Lachenmann, where conventional pitch and noise are treated as equal components of music language.
The opening establishes an ambiguous terrain in which sound seems suspended, neither fully static nor clearly directional. Movement exists, but within tight constraints, as if the music were confined to a limited space.
As the piece unfolds, the texture becomes densely populated with fleeting details: small sonic events that emerge and vanish before they can be fully grasped. Moments of rhythmic definition offer brief orientation, yet they are continually undermined by the instability of the surrounding environment.
The ending does not resolve this tension. Instead, a few luminous tones remain, gradually dissolving into silence, leaving behind a sense of unresolved presence.
8 Limun for violin and viola-2011-9’-YT/Maurer-Mellinger
Written for violin and viola, Limun explores the inherent tension between two closely related instruments. Their interaction generates a constant play of friction and resonance.
Sustained bow pressure produces airy harmonics, while abrupt interruptions and sharp changes of direction disrupt any sense of continuity. The music seems to circle around itself in the first part, driven by a succession of contrasting techniques.
In the second half, these opposing forces begin to realign. Without eliminating the tension, the piece gradually moves toward a more balanced state, where the earlier conflicts are not resolved but absorbed into a quieter equilibrium.
Il colore dell’ombra: sound as material, exposed in its inner grain and instability
Dead Wasps in the Jam-Jar II: gesture expanded into resonance, dissolving into its own afterlife
Moult: Transformation through shedding, where past forms persist as sonic imprints
Paw Marks in wet cement: music as trace, shaped by what remains rather than what is stated
Earthing-Dead Wasps: a dense, unstable field where noise and pitch continuously blur
Limun: friction between instrumental identities, moving toward a fragile equilibrium
Strange Bird: slow, directionless drift, sustained without arrival or release
The purple fuchsia bled upon the ground: grief rendered as accumulation and saturation of sound
Taken together, these works form a remarkably coherent body of music.
6 Chaya Czernowin-1957-Israel
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Opera
Chaya Czernowin’s music explores the fragile and often volatile boundaries between sound, noise, and silence, creating works that operate as perceptual and emotional thresholds. Her compositional language is rooted in extreme contrasts: between presence and absence, intimacy and violence, control and disintegration.Yet these oppositions are never static. Instead, they generate a continuous state of becoming.
Her approach to form is fundamentally experiential. Rather than unfolding along linear trajectories, her pieces evolve as shifting landscapes in which attention is constantly redirected. The listener is invited into a heightened state of listening, where minute sonic details like breath, friction, resonance carry as much weight as large-scale structural gestures. Czernowin’s work is also deeply theatrical, even outside the operatic domain. She constructs situations in which sound becomes a carrier of psychological and corporeal intensity, often pushing performers and audiences alike to the edge of perception. Across her output, there is a persistent search for new modes of expression that challenge conventional listening, making her music both demanding and profoundly immersive.
1 The Quiet for orchestra-2010-11’-YT/BRSO-Lubman
Marc’s Note:
The Quiet belongs to a trilogy of orchestral works (with Zohar Iver and Esh) in which Czernowin seeks to transcend language and to create music that can be physically perceived, almost touched through the ear. The work marks a turning point in her output, opening a new orientation in her compositional thinking.
Dense, weighty blocks of material are set against lighter, more volatile strands, establishing a dynamic field of opposing forces. Czernowin’s interest in physical processes, interactions between energy, matter and particles, becomes here a compositional driver rather than a metaphor.
The work points toward what might be described as a third realm, situated between sensory perception and cognition, at the edge of consciousness. In this respect, The Quiet is not only a structural exploration, but part of a broader search for territories that lie beyond immediate perception, whether physical or mental.
2 Cello Concerto-Guardian-2017-31’-YT/Ballon-SWR SO-Broseta
Marc’s Note:
The Guardian follows the opera Infinite Now, whose dark expressive world casts a long shadow over the concerto. Conceived as a search for a protective force, the work unfolds like a dream in which elements of reality and imagination interpenetrate.
The relationship between soloist and orchestra departs from traditional concerto models. The cello emerges from within the orchestral texture, only to detach itself again, while the orchestra itself adopts cello-like qualities: wind instruments produce breath-infused tones that blur the distinction between soloist and orchestra.
Amplification and extended techniques expand the expressive range of both forces, creating a constantly shifting field of timbral correspondences. Although the work includes a cadenza, it does not function as a summation but rather as a moment of exposure, where the underlying tension becomes transparent.
The final orchestral eruption does not resolve this tension but brings it into stark relief, closing the work with a gesture of overwhelming force.
3 The divine thawing of the Core for flute and ensemble-2025-31’-YT/Chase-Talea Ensemble-Baker
Marc’s Note:
The divine Thawing of the Core opens with the contrabass flute in an exposed, almost fragile state. Its sound is elemental, stripped of rhetoric, hovering between breath, tone and noise.
This initial intimacy does not develop linearly; instead, it is gradually destabilized, eroded from within.
What follows is an uneven process of transformation. Moments of ironic distortion fracture the surface, giving way to sudden eruptions of brutality. The appearance of a distorted, almost grotesque waltz introduces a destabilizing pulse, as if a familiar cultural gesture were being pulled into a darker, uncontrollable domain.
The work unfolds through cycles and returns, but these repetitions are never identical.
Temporal perception is constantly unsettled: expansions, compressions and dislocations create the impression of a process that both advances and circles back on itself. What emerges is a progressive thawing, not towards clarity, but towards a more exposed, ritualistic state, coherent in its own logic yet raw, almost primitive in its expressive force.
Without explicitly naming a political program, Czernowin alludes to a process of internal collapse. The metaphor of thawing suggests not renewal, but dissolution: the erosion of structures that once held meaning. What remains is marked by loss, disorientation and a profound sense of human fragility.
In this work, the musical writing reaches a striking intensity. The control of sonic transformation, the tension between intimacy and violence, and the instability of temporal flow give the piece a rare expressive power; one that resonates far beyond its immediate material.
4 SQ and electronics-Hidden-2014-43’-YT/Jack Qt
Marc’s Note:
In Hidden, a spatialized string quartet with live electronics, the musical material unfolds as if submerged. Sound does not project outward but seems to circulate within a dense, resistant medium, where direction and contour lose their usual clarity.
A submerged labyrinth of monolithic sonic masses emerges, shaped as much by voids as by presence. Low vibrations, internal frictions and suspended silences are not so much heard as physically sensed. The music withdraws from the surface of conventional expression and progressively inhabits a space where perception itself becomes unstable.
Czernowin is concerned here with what remains concealed or only partially accessible.
The listener encounters traces, echoes and residual energies rather than clearly articulated gestures. The quartet and electronics do not oppose each other but fuse into a single, elusive body of sound constantly shifting between materiality and disappearance.
At the end a rupture occurs. The electronic layer introduces compressed fragments of the real world: rain, a nocturnal environment, the passing of a car. After the prolonged abstraction, these sounds appear almost violently concrete. The piece does not resolve, but rather breaks its own frame, allowing reality to intrude where perception has been suspended.
5 The Hour Glass bleeds still for string sextet-1992-1999-18’-YT/Vilhjalmsson-Yehudin-Hartman-Gertner-Silvestri-Comforty-Shani
Marc’s Note:
This string sextet explores the interrelation of motion and time through phenomena that exist at the threshold of hearing, speech and physical gesture. Czernowin’s writing generates a rich spectrum of timbres that tend to detach sound from its instrumental source, creating a sense of disembodiment.
In the absence of an explicit narrative, the listener is drawn into a succession of states characterized by multiplicity and fragility. The image of blood, understood as pulse, becomes a central organizing principle, shaping the perception of time, rhythm and corporeal presence.
As in many of Czernowin‘s works, a single core idea is continuously transformed and refracted, allowing the piece to unfold as a concentrated exploration of a limited but deeply probed sonic territory.
6 Afatsim for 9 players-1995-10’-Spotify/Sonor
Marc’s Note:
In Afatsim, Czernowin creates a sonic environment in which individual instrumental identities dissolve into a composite, often untraceable sound. Written for nine players divided into four spatially separated groups, the work deliberately obscures the origin of sound, with the notable exception of the bass clarinet.
The piece unfolds with extreme restraint: near-inaudible textures, whispers and breath-like gestures dominate the opening. Gradually, these fragile elements coalesce into a more unified and substantial sonic body, gaining momentum and density.
What emerges is music that destabilizes perception, where timbre detaches itself from instrumental cause. The trajectory: from fragmentation to a final, grounded presence marked by a deep, almost visceral growl gives the work a quiet but compelling sense of inevitability.
7 Atara for two amplified voices and orchestra-2020-2021-37’-Spotify/Jernberg-Falk-ORF Radio SO-Vienna-Karlsen
Marc’s Note:
Atara emerges from a pre-pandemic conception in which large orchestral masses drift, collide and separate under the pressure of unstable and uncontrollable forces. What initially took shape as a meditation on human hubris, our belief that we can master the energies that surround us, was overtaken by reality as the events of 2020 unfolded. The work thus acquires an almost prophetic dimension, reflecting a world abruptly confronted with its own limits.
The integration of a lockdown poem by Zohar Eitan introduces a fragile, human scale into this vast sonic landscape. Against the slow, tectonic movement of the orchestra, the vocal and chamber forces appear exposed, even disoriented, inhabiting spaces suddenly opened by the orchestral blocks. Czernowin constructed a tension between mass and vulnerability, between overwhelming physical forces and the delicate, often uncertain presence of the human voice.
The result is not a narrative in the traditional sense, but a field of interacting energies in which lament, disorientation and resistance coexist. The music does not describe the crisis so much as it embodies it, transforming abstract concepts of force and instability into an immediate and visceral sonic experience.
8 Opera-Heart Chamber-2018/2019-90’-DVD/Ciofi-Frenkel-Henschel-Wey-Ensemble Nikel-SWR Experimentalstudio-Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin-Kalitzke
Marc’s Note:
Following the emotional intensity of Pnima, the bold reworking of Mozart in Zaïde/Adama and the dark, expansive landscape of Infinite Now, Czernowin arrives with Heart Chamber at a radically different operatic form. Here the focus shifts inward: the opera becomes the exploration of an internal landscape rather than an external narrative.
Czernowin writes her own libretto and constructs the work as a sequence of eight close-ups rather than a continuous dramatic flow. A simple, almost incidental encounter as a woman drops a jar of honey and a man returns it, sets the possibility of a relationship in motion.
From this minimal premise unfolds a complex web of emotional states, without linear development or resolution.
The stage becomes a space of layered perception. Voices are doubled through the use of alter egos that articulate inner thoughts, while microphones, pre-recorded material and video projections extend the vocal and visual dimensions beyond physical presence. The orchestra, enriched by subtle electronic means, does not accompany but rather participates in shaping this inner terrain, binding together the various expressive layers.
The work unfolds through a set of distinct yet interrelated modalities, intimate close-ups that carry the fragile progression of the relationship, overwhelming sound surges that saturate the space; Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response-like episodes that magnify minute bodily actions; dream sequences reflecting social and psychological pressures and the recurring images of forests, whether of hair, muscles or veins, which suggest an organic, almost disorienting interior world.
Rather than narrating a love story, Heart Chamber exposes its conditions: uncertainty, projection, vulnerability and the impossibility of grasping the other.
The fluidity of form mirrors the instability of emotional connection and the absence of closure becomes an essential part of the work’s meaning. What emerges is a highly detailed and demanding operatic experience, where precision of writing and multiplicity of expressive modes require sustained attention and often repeated encounters to be fully apprehended.
7 Unsuk Chin-1961-Korea
Primary Forces:Orchestral, Vocal, Opera
Unsuk Chin is one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music, combining an extraordinary refinement of sound with a highly imaginative, often playful approach to musical form. A student of György Ligeti, she absorbed his fascination with complexity, virtuosity and layered processes, yet rapidly moved beyond his influence to develop a language that is unmistakably her own.
Her music is characterized by a constant transformation of material. Rather than relying on traditional development, Chin often builds her works from simple generative cells, allowing them to evolve through internal rules that produce unpredictable yet coherent structures. This gives her music a sense of organic growth, where events seem to arise naturally rather than being imposed.
A defining feature of her style is her mastery of timbre and texture. Chin treats the orchestra as a vast laboratory of sound, creating iridescent surfaces, intricate layers and strikingly original colour combinations. Even with conventional instrumentation, she achieves sonorities that feel unfamiliar, often blurring the boundaries between soloist and ensemble.
Despite the sophistication of her techniques, her music retains a strong expressive immediacy. There is frequently a playful, even fantastical dimension, sometimes bordering on the grotesque, alongside moments of introspection and lyrical intensity. Her work is also nourished by extra-musical inspirations, ranging from literature and visual art to natural and scientific phenomena.
Chin’s output reflects a rare balance between intellectual rigour and sensory richness. She stands as a composer who expands the possibilities of contemporary music not through radical rupture, but through a continuous reimagining of sound, form and musical perception.
1 Piano Concerto-1996-1997-29‘-YT/Piemontesi-Helsinki PO-Hermus
Marc’s Note:
Chin’s intimate relationship with the piano, cultivated since early childhood, finds a natural resonance in this concerto, where the shadow of her mentor Ligeti is unmistakably present. The solo writing often evokes the intricate, kinetic energy of Ligeti’s Études, yet Chin extends this language into a broader orchestral dimension, layering it with shimmering, ever-shifting textures.
The concerto is driven by vitality and motion. Chin foregrounds the piano’s percussive brilliance and virtuosity, revealing a playful, almost mischievous imagination at work. Each of the four movements possesses a distinct expressive identity, yet all are governed by a shared principle: the rejection of predetermined form. Instead, each movement unfolds from a basic generative cell, governed by simple rules that yield complex and unpredictable results.The piano is not positioned in opposition to the orchestra but embedded within it. Chin’s ultimate aim is the fusion of forces, the emergence of a “super-instrument” in which soloist and orchestra dissolve into a single, multifaceted entity.
2 Violin Concerto 1-2001-29’-YT/Hagner-Sao Paulo SO-Thomson
Marc’s Note:
While the formal outline and orchestral apparatus may appear relatively conventional, Chin transforms them from within. Her true innovation lies in the luxuriant refinement of colour and texture: a constantly evolving sonic fabric over which the violin unfolds in arcs of soaring lyricism and cascading brilliance.
The solo part is exceptionally demanding, yet the violinist is not cast as a heroic adversary but as an equal partner within a richly interactive environment. The extensive percussion palette plays a decisive role in shaping the work’s atmosphere, while the second movement introduces a distinctive luminosity through the use of harp and celesta clusters.The fourth movement provides a striking contrast. It begins in the violin’s highest register and gradually expands downward, retracing and transforming earlier material. Echoes of previous movements resurface, culminating in a conclusion that subtly mirrors the opening.
The concerto as a whole functions as a prism through which different historical layers of musical thought are refracted, never quoted, but gently alluded to and reimagined.
3 Rocana for symphonic orchestra-2008-21’-Spotify/Montreal SO-Nagano
Marc’s Note:
The title Rocaná, meaning “room of light” in Sanskrit, points directly to the work’s central preoccupation: the behaviour of light in its many transformations: refraction, reflection, distortion, and wave-like motion. Chin’s inspiration here extends beyond music into the realm of visual art, particularly the large-scale installations of Olafur Eliasson.
The piece unfolds as a continuous, uninterrupted flow, experienced less as a sequence of events than as a vast, evolving sonic sculpture. At times, the music suggests stasis, yet beneath the surface subtle processes of interaction and transformation are constantly at work.
Rather than traditional development, Chin favours seamless metamorphosis. Elements merge, dissolve, and reconfigure, generating new sonic relationships. The orchestral palette, though seemingly conventional, is used in a highly imaginative way: the orchestra becomes an “illusion machine,” capable of producing unfamiliar colours from familiar means.
A certain clarity, perhaps reflecting Chin’s openness to non-European aesthetic perspectives, pervades the work, even at its most complex. The result is a luminous, immersive experience in which sound itself seems to behave like light.
4 Cello Concerto-2009-2013-27’-Spotify/Gerhardt-Berliner PO-Myung Whun Chung
Marc’s Note:
This concerto stands as perhaps Chin’s most ambitious engagement with the genre, and notably one in which Ligeti’s influence recedes almost entirely. The solo writing pushes the instrument to its expressive and technical limits, constantly redefining the relationship between individual and collective.
As in many of her works, Chin begins from a reduced state, a primal cell, from which the musical discourse unfolds organically. This generative principle shapes much of the first movement, where the material expands with an almost biological inevitability. The harps play a crucial role, establishing a central resonance that binds soloist and orchestra.
The second movement erupts as a frenetic scherzo, driven by a relentless percussion ostinato. Yet the true centre of gravity lies in the third movement: a searching, introspective landscape in which the cello spins a chorale-like line over the dark sonorities of the lower strings. The movement culminates in an uncanny dialogue between the ascending cello and the depths of the contrabassoon.
The final movement introduces a more confrontational dynamic, which Chin herself has described as a form of psychological warfare. The cello is subjected to sharp, almost aggressive gestures from the orchestra. After a powerful orchestral outburst, the soloist reasserts itself with an extended, reflective line: an echo of earlier material.
The concerto does not resolve in a traditional sense. Instead, it arrives at a kind of fragile coexistence: the cello persists, rising ever higher until its sound seems to dissolve into the ether, leaving behind an unresolved but deeply human tension.
5 Clarinet Concerto-2013-2014-24’-YT/Kriikku-Gothenburg SO-Nagano
Marc’s Note:
The clarinet, with its uniquely fluid and ambiguous timbre, becomes in this concerto a voice from another realm. Chin explores its capacity for transformation, seeking new harmonic, tonal, and rhythmic processes that transcend the conventional opposition of tonality and atonality.
Subtle traces of jazz permeate the work, not as stylistic references but as an underlying impulse. The clarinet remains the central axis, while the orchestra responds, refracts, and comments upon its gestures.
Chin’s fascination with sound transformation is evident in her use of extended techniques and unconventional instrumental combinations. The percussion section, enriched by objects such as fishing reels, washboards, springs, and wine glasses, contributes a strikingly original sonic dimension.
She also ventures beyond the classical tradition, incorporating stylized elements reminiscent of ritualistic or folk practices, though always in a consciously artificial and recontextualized form.
The three movements each present distinct characters: the first unfolds through the interaction of contrasting materials; the second takes on the character of a passacaglia; the third breaks sharply away, evolving as a groove-based, quasi-improvisatory structure. The concerto stands as a vivid demonstration of Chin’s inventive imagination and her mastery of timbral dramaturgy.
6 SQ-ParaMetaString-1995-21’-Spotify/Esme Qt
Marc’s Note:
In her string quartets and concertos alike, Chin treats the string medium as a field of sonic investigation. In the more intimate setting of the quartet, this exploration becomes even more concentrated.
The first movement introduces blocks of sound that establish an essentially arhythmic structure, creating the impression of an expanded, elastic sense of time. The second movement turns to harmonics, constructing a delicate sound world in which col legno articulations in the cello provide an ostinato foundation.
The third movement focuses on one of Chin’s characteristic concerns: the internal modulation of a single pitch, here explored through the cello, while the upper strings respond with upward-shifting transformations.
The fourth movement returns to and extends the material of the first, but now with a striking kinetic image: the listener may perceive something akin to objects falling and rebounding, as if gravity itself were being gradually reversed. The acceleration of tempo reinforces this sensation of altered physical laws.
7 Akrostichon for soprano and orchestra-1991-18’-YT/Petrus-Cantata Profana-Ashworth
Marc’s Note:
In this early vocal work, Chin already reveals the essential traits of her musical language: playfulness, unpredictability, and a taste for the grotesque.
Akrostichon draws on texts from The Neverending Story by Michael Ende and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, yet language is treated in a highly unconventional manner. Semantic meaning is deliberately obscured. Consonants and vowels are fragmented and recombined, words are sometimes reversed, and language becomes a symbolic rather than communicative medium.
The work consists of seven scenes, each centred on a controlling pitch that carries a distinct expressive function. Emotional states are suggested rather than explicitly depicted, echoing the shifting psychological landscapes of the source texts.
Chin also experiments with microtonality, employing tunings that deviate by fractions such as a quarter- or sixth-tone. The soprano must navigate these subtle inflections with great precision, moving between different tuning systems.
Already here, one senses the emergence of Chin’s mature voice: a composer for whom sound, language, and meaning exist in a state of constant transformation.
8 Opera-Alice in Wonderland-2004-2007-124’-YT/Matthews-Komsi-Henschel-De Mey-Choir and Children’s Choir Bavarian State Opera-Bavarian State Orch-Nagano
Marc’s Note:
Late in his life, Ligeti dreamed of setting Lewis Carroll’s Alice to music. It is one of history’s small ironies that this vision was ultimately realized, in transformed form, by one of his most gifted students.
Chin’s Alice in Wonderland is not a straightforward adaptation but a deeply personal reimagining. She incorporates elements from her own dream life, most notably in the opening, blurring the boundaries between narrative, memory, and subconscious experience. Her aim is not merely to depict a dream world, but to allow dream and reality to collide and coexist.
The score is rich in allusion. Subtle echoes of composers such as Ravel, Händel, Elgar, Puccini, and Stravinsky flicker through the texture, never as quotation but as playful homage. At the same time, Chin expands the sonic palette with an array of unconventional sounds: bottles, alarm clocks, kettles, cutlery:objects that anchor the fantastical in the world of the everyday.
Compared to her other works, the music is strikingly pictorial and narrative, engaging directly with operatic tradition even as it gently subverts it. The result is a theatre of transformation, where voices leap, fragment, and reassemble within a kaleidoscopic orchestral environment.
Beneath the surface brilliance lies a more elusive thread: the question of identity. Alice’s journey becomes a meditation on instability, perception, and the fluid nature of the self.
With this opera, Chin affirms herself as a master of transformation: one who dissolves the boundaries between logic and imagination, turning dream into structure and structure into dream.
8 Mark Andre-1964-France
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber
Mark Andre composes at the threshold of disappearance. His music does not project outward; it withdraws, listens, and waits. Silence is not absence but a field of potential, almost sacred, charged with fragile expectancy. Emerging from spectralism yet moving far beyond its technical premises, Andre integrates theology, phenomenology, and a deeply personal spirituality into a language where sound itself seems to question its right to exist.
Each gesture is reduced to its most essential vibration. Each resonance feels like a trace left behind by something already gone. His works unfold as acts of attention rather than assertion: music that does not claim, but seeks. In this sense, Andre’s art is one of humility: a patient orientation toward the inaudible, toward what withdraws even as it appears.
1 Violin Concerto-An-2014-2015-22’-YT/C.Widmann-WDR SO Köln-Ceccherini
Marc’s Note:
A work of extreme inwardness. The solo violin does not confront the orchestra but dissolves into it, threading fragile lines through a landscape of whispers, harmonics, and breath-like textures. The orchestral writing is extraordinarily refined, less accompaniment than environment, a shifting halo of resonance.
Time itself feels suspended. The concerto unfolds as a slow inhalation and exhalation, where emergence and disappearance are indistinguishable. Virtuosity here is not display but control at the limits of audibility. The violin becomes a medium rather than an agent, carrying sound toward its vanishing point.
2 Clarinet Concerto-Über with live electronics-2015-39’-YT/SWR SO Baden-Baden-Roth
Marc’s Note:
A pivotal work in Andre’s output, über extends his exploration of disappearance into the domain of live electronics. The clarinet, with its natural affinity for breath and instability, becomes the ideal instrument for this inquiry. Its tones are stretched, fractured, and echoed by the electronic layer, creating a constantly shifting of the acoustic sound.
The electronics do not decorate or amplify; they reveal hidden dimensions, prolonging decay, exposing internal noise, transforming attacks into spectral halos. The result is a destabilization of identity: what is live, what is reflection, what is residue?
Formally, the concerto resists linear progression. It unfolds as a series of thresholds, where sound crosses into silence and returns altered. The clarinet seems to search, not for thematic development but for a place where it can fully dissolve. It is one of Andre’s most haunting meditations on the permeability between presence and absence.
3 Woher…wohin-2015-2017-27’-YT/Deutsches SO Berlin-Christ
Marc’s Note:
“From where…to where…”, the title itself frames the work as a question without resolution. This orchestral piece operates on a vast temporal horizon, where sound appears as if emerging from an unknown origin and moving toward an equally unknowable destination.
The material is sparse but intensely focused: isolated tones, distant rumblings, fragile accumulations of texture. Andre constructs a space rather than a narrative: a space in which listening becomes orientation.
What distinguishes this work is its sense of direction without movement. There is a profound feeling of transition, yet nothing overtly progresses. The listener is suspended between two infinities: origin and disappearance. The orchestra becomes a medium for existential inquiry, where every sound asks where it comes from and where it is going and receives no answer.
4 Im Entschwinden-2022-11‘-YT/Orch de Paris-Mäkelä
Marc’s Note:
“In the Fading Away.” A distillation of Andre’s mature language. The orchestral fabric is reduced to near immobility: air tones, muted brass, distant echoes. Sound is constantly on the verge of vanishing, and yet never fully disappears.
The tension lies precisely in this suspension. Each event feels provisional, contingent. Listening becomes an act of heightened awareness, of following something that may cease at any moment.
Here, disappearance is no longer dramatic or even perceptible as a process. It is simply the condition of sound itself.
5 Riss I-II-III-2014-2017-49‘-YT/EIC-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
A large-scale exploration of rupture: Riss meaning fissure or tear. Across its three parts, Andre constructs a landscape of fractures: sudden intrusions, broken continuities, fragile surfaces that open to reveal something beneath.
The material is minimal, yet the internal tension is immense. Silence is not neutral; it is charged, unstable, ready to split. When sound emerges, it often does so violently, as a crack in the surface rather than a development.
This is one of Andre’s most dramatic works, though its drama is internalized. It is the drama of interruption, of discontinuity, of faith confronted with rupture.
6 SQ-IV 13-2014-2017-50’-Spotify/Arditti Qt
Marc’s Note:
A work of extraordinary intimacy. The quartet becomes a single organism, breathing collectively. The instruments rarely assert individual identity; instead, they merge into a shared field of micro-gestures: bow noise, harmonics, fragile sustained tones.
Moments of near-silence dominate, but they are not empty. They are filled with microscopic activity, barely perceptible shifts in texture and color. Occasionally, a chord emerges, luminous, almost shocking in its clarity, like a fleeting revelation.
The piece unfolds as a form of listening itself: attentive, patient, open.
7 …selig ist…for piano and electronics-2023-2024-63’-YT/Aimard-SWR-Experimentalstudio
Marc’s Note:
Taking its title from the Beatitudes, this work for piano and electronics represents a new level of synthesis in Andre’s music. The piano’s attacks, inherently percussive and finite, are extended by electronics into continuous resonance.
Each note becomes a field rather than a point. Decay is transformed into presence. The electronic layer acts as a kind of afterlife for the acoustic sound, allowing it to persist beyond its physical limits.
The result is both deeply human and strangely immaterial. Touch becomes resonance; gesture becomes aura. It is one of Andre’s most direct confrontations between the physical and the transcendent.
8 HIJ 2 for 24 voices and live electronics-2012-YT/SWR Vocal Ensemble-Creed-SWR Experimental Studio
Marc’s Note:
For 24 voices and live electronics, HIJ 2 is among Andre’s most radical works. The human voice, traditionally the bearer of text, meaning, and expression is stripped of its conventional functions and reduced to pure breath, noise, and fragmentary phonation.
The choir does not sing in any traditional sense. Instead, it produces a continuum of fragile vocal phenomena: inhalations, exhalations, whispered consonants, unstable pitches. The electronics extend and transform these sounds, creating a blurred boundary between human and non-human resonance.
Text, if present, is dissolved to the point of near-unintelligibility. Meaning is not conveyed but erased. What remains is the physicality of voice, its vulnerability, its dependence on breath.
The work unfolds as a collective act of disappearance. Individual voices lose identity within the ensemble, just as the ensemble itself dissolves into the electronic field. It is a profound meditation on the limits of expression where language fails, and only the trace of presence remains.
9 Gabriela Ortiz-1964-Mexico
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Chamber, Vocal
Gabriela Ortiz stands as one of the most compelling compositional voices of her generation, a figure who has succeeded in reconciling cultural identity, political awareness and contemporary technique without ever allowing one dimension to dominate the others. Her music is immediately recognisable for its vitality: rhythm is never decorative, but structural, often rooted in Afro-Caribbean and Mexican traditions while transformed through a sophisticated, modern language.
At the core of her work lies a constant dialogue between worlds. Ortiz does not simply “quote” tradition; she reimagines it. Indigenous memory, colonial history, urban culture and global contemporary practices coexist in a fluid, often volatile equilibrium. This creates a musical space where hybridity is not an aesthetic choice but a lived reality. Her fascination with concepts such as appropriation, transformation and ritual gives her works a strong conceptual backbone, yet they remain sensuous, direct and communicative.
Another defining aspect is her ability to merge intellectual frameworks with emotional immediacy. Whether drawing on fractal geometry, ecological concerns or social movements, Ortiz never allows abstraction to become sterile. Her music breathes, dances and protests. Large-scale orchestral works reveal a masterful sense of colour and pacing, while chamber pieces retain an almost tactile intimacy, often evoking voices, bodies and collective memory.
Increasingly, her output has taken on a civic dimension. Works such as Yanga or Revolución diamantina show a composer fully engaged with the urgencies of her time, transforming music into a vehicle for historical reflection and social resonance. Yet even in these explicitly political contexts, she avoids rhetoric: the message emerges through sound itself.
Ortiz’s trajectory suggests not only a major Latin American composer, but a central figure in contemporary music at large. Her ability to integrate tradition and innovation, ritual and modernity, places her among the rare composers who expand the language while remaining deeply human.
1 Violin Concerto-Altar de Cuerda-2021-34’-YT/Park-Minnesota Orch-Bortolameolli
Marc’s Note:
Written for a virtuoso soloist, the brilliant Spanish violinist, Maria Duenas, this concerto balances fierce lyricism with rhythmic intricacy.
The violin sings, dances and mourns, a voice both individual and ancestral.
The orchestration sparkles with colourful percussion brilliance, yet every gesture remains anchored in expressive intent.
For Ortiz, the altar is not a religious concept. It tends toward the symbolic, the spiritual and the magic. It also evokes devotion and offering: sound as ritual sacrifice and renewal.
An unmistakable conceptual eclecticism is one of the main tendencies that define her music.
In the first movement she alludes to themes like hybridization and unstable borders, but it also represents her visions on cultural appropriation and reappropriation.
The second, slow, movement is a distant reference to the open chapels of Mexican sixteenth-century churches built to lure indigenous populations inside.
Chords are built and dissolved and the harmonies move like a slow sea swell, while the violin floats over the sound waves.
The final movement is driven by rhythm and an extended dialog unfolds between the violin and the orchestra. Once again imitations of Mexican cultural icons are alluded to.
2 Piano Concerto-Fractalis-2022-30-YT/Graichy-Orch Nat de Bretagne-Menezes
Marc’s Note:
Initially, Ortiz conceived the concerto in three sections evoking fractal geometries of nature in chaos.
Then Covid struck and she had to face the fact that abnormality had become the new normal in our lives. Ortiz realised that silence would become an active presence, while the awareness of sound would take on a new meaning.
She felt the urge to create a musical space of reflection that would mirror our plight and be a means of healing and spiritual development.
A Mantra with its repetitive character, became one of the new movements.
A Mandala provided another way of giving sense to our lives as it is composed of a structure of designs representing nature and the universe.
The composer felt that the combination of the three chaotic sections and the two soothing ones could work, provided they were alternated.
Fractal patterns guide the piano’s dazzling interplay with the orchestra, creating an architecture of repetition and variation: despite its mathematical premise, the music feels organic, alive with improvisatory spirit.
Fractalis is a celebration of complexity that never loses human warmth, maintaining a rare balance between intellect and instinct.
3 Cello Concerto-Dzonot-2024-33’-Spotify/Weilerstein-LA Phil-Dudamel
Marc’s Note:
Dzonot (cenote in Spanish) is a term that is derived from the Mayan language and means abyss.
Ortiz has been inspired by the cenotes of Yucatan, which harbour subterranean rivers and caves.
The work becomes a form of musical dissent with the purpose of finding new advocates to the cause of conservation.
The cenotes supply drinking water and possess great biodiversity with endemic species of flora and fauna that must be preserved.
Deforestation and transportation infrastructure in the forests destroy the habitat of the jaguar.
Another endangered species is the toh bird with its beautiful plumage, which lives in caverns.
In the first movement, called vertical light, cello and orchestra try to evoke the hypnotic effect it produces during the summer solstice on the water inside the cenotes.
The next movement is one of transformation, where the cello gradually assumes an almost animal presence, recalling techniques found in composers such as Unsuk Chin. The cello transforms subtly and metaphorically into the voice and body of the jaguar.
The third movement is one of reflection on the subterranean rivers. Towards the end, repeated rhythmic motifs acquire a mechanical pulse, driving the music toward a climax. Her idea is to metaphorically represent the damages caused by human actions.
In the final movement the toh bird takes flight and the music unfolds with full abandon to echo the freedom and also the hope that the bird will not lose its place in the rainforest.
The dedicatee, Alisa Weilerstein, declared that Dzonot ranks among the most challenging concertos she has ever performed and believes it will become a classic of the 21st century.
4 SQ-Altar de Muertos-1997-45’-YT/Quarteto Q Arte
Marc’s Note:
Ortiz’s quartet reflects an inner search between the real and the magical, something that has always been present in Mexican culture.
The first movement evokes the visit of four spirits to the altar, singing their offering and converging in a single chant at the end.
In the second movement ritualistic textures evoke the passage of death and the eternal struggle between night and day.
The third movement unfolds through fantastic, shifting images, where phantasmagoria and magic play a major role.
La Calaca, the fourth and last movement is the climax of the piece. Syncretism, symbolism and the duality of life are represented.
The quartet ends on a joyous note, full of vitality and expressive power.
It is one of Ortiz’s early masterpieces and merges folk ritual with contemporary expressivity.
The string instruments imitate guitars, drums and voices with striking immediacy in a vivid homage to Mexico’s Dia de Muertos. Yet beneath the rhythmic vitality lies tenderness, remembrance as a living presence.
The work remains a cornerstone of Latin American chamber music, bridging the sacred and the sensual.
5 De Cuerda y Madera for violin and piano-2024-14’-YT/Vukovich-Thiruchelvam
Marc’s Note:
Following the successful violin concerto, Ortiz decided to write a short piece for violin and piano as a musical capriccio.
Virtuosity is central to the close dialogue between the two instruments.
Two fast, lively sections are inspired by Afro-Caribbean or folkloric music, while a slower and more cantabile section offers a brief moment of repose.
A small cadenza appears in the last movement which is punctuated by piano interventions and prepares the final coda.
6 SQ-Aroma foliado-2006-16’-YT/Eclipse Qt
Marc’s Note:
Ortiz has always been fascinated by the concept of appropriation, a practice common in the visual arts where reinterpretation generates new meaning in different contexts. Commissioned for the 250th anniversary of Mozart, she initially hesitated to incorporate literal quotations, before choosing instead to create points of intersection with his musical language.
The work unfolds in a rondo-like form, allowing a fluid circulation of contrasting materials. Fragments from Mozart’s String Quartet K.575 appear not as static quotations but as fleeting memories—brief windows that emerge, dissolve and reconfigure within Ortiz’s own musical discourse. These moments are often rhythmically displaced or harmonically refracted, as if heard through a shifting temporal lens.
The quartet writing moves between transparency and density. Light, almost classical textures—clear lines, balanced phrases—are interrupted by more percussive, rhythmically charged passages typical of Ortiz’s style. The instruments occasionally abandon their traditional roles, producing gestures that evoke plucked strings, breath-like attacks or fragmented echoes, subtly destabilising the Mozartean reference.
What gives the piece its particular character is this constant oscillation between past and present. Mozart is never imitated; he is remembered, filtered through Ortiz’s own musical identity. The result is a work that feels both playful and reflective, where elegance coexists with tension, and where history becomes a living, malleable material rather than a fixed point of reference.
7 Yanga for choir, percussion quartet and orchestra-2019-18’-Spotify/LA Master Chorale-Tambuco Percussion-LA PO-Dudamel
Marc’s Note:
The piece unfolds in four contrasting sections, alternating between rhythmic drive and slower, more reflective passages.
Ortiz introduces the unique colour of African instruments into her imagined sound world.
The choir reinforces the rhythmic fabric, creates dense polyphonic textures and engages in a dynamic dialogue with the percussion parts and the orchestra.
In this large-scale work Yanga commemorates Gaspar Yanga, the African leader who founded one of the first free communities of the Americas.
Ortiz combines Afro-Mexican rhythms, chant, and contemporary orchestration into a jubilant assertion of identity. The result is both historical and visionary: a symphonic act of liberation through sound.
8 Revolucion Diamantina-2023-36’-Spotify/LA Master Chorale-LA PO-Dudamel
Marc’s Note:
The ballet score is inspired by Mexico’s 2019 “Glitter Revolution”, the feminist uprising around the country’s epidemic of violence against women.
It is divided in six acts for symphonic orchestra and 8 amplified voices.
Ortiz explains that each of them is related to forms of harassment and violence against women, whether in the public or private sphere. Her aim is not only to expose this violence, but to provoke collective awareness and response.
Glitter was used as a symbol of rebellion in the demonstrations.
The score mirrors that duality: glittering textures masking deep emotion. Electronics, percussion and orchestra converge in a radiant protest, a call for change sung in light.
It is music of courage, beauty and unstoppable resonance.
10 John Luther Adams-1953-United States
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Vocal
John Luther Adams stands apart in contemporary music not by complexity alone, but by orientation. His work does not seek to dominate sound, but to inhabit it. Few composers have so consistently dissolved the boundary between music and environment, between composition and listening. If others write pieces, Adams creates conditions for awareness.
His art emerges from a lifelong engagement with landscape, especially the vast expanses of Alaska. Yet this is not “nature music” in any superficial sense. Rather, Adams composes systems of resonance: slowly evolving fields where harmony, space, and time interact like natural forces. The listener is not guided through narrative, but immersed in process: tidal, atmospheric, geological.
Three constants define his voice:
Scale and slowness: time is stretched until perception itself becomes the subject.
Sound as ecology: instruments behave like elements: winds, currents, light.
Spiritual materialism: the music is grounded in physical acoustics, yet opens onto metaphysical experience.
Adams belongs to no school, though one might place him at a distant intersection of Iannis Xenakis’s elemental thinking and Giacinto Scelsi’s inward exploration of sound. Unlike either, however, Adams removes the human ego almost entirely. His music does not express; it reveals. At its highest level, his work achieves something rare: it restores listening as a form of attention to the world itself.
1 Dark Waves for orchestra and electronics-2007-12’-YT/Radio Filharmonisch Orkest-van Zweden
Marc’s Note:
A concentrated premonition of Become Ocean, Dark Waves already contains Adams’s oceanic thinking in embryonic form.
It combines layers of electronic and orchestral sound to generate a huge climax, which gradually subsides.
Vast wave motions are evoked in sounds that seem to reverberate below and above our hearing.
Every instrument plays with the simple interval of the perfect fifth, but at climax lines coalesce into dissonances with all twelve notes of the chromatic scale sounding together.
The perfect fifth becomes a structural anchor, an interval of stability, gradually destabilized as the mass thickens into total chromatic saturation.
The climax is not simply loud; it is overfull, a kind of sonic flooding.
It is a hinge work where Adams first integrates electronics with orchestra, not as contrast but as continuum.
What is striking is how the electronics are not external but absorbed into orchestral breath. The musicians do not accompany, they humanize the electronic field, giving it pulse and fragility.
During the composition the composer reflected on the ominous events of our times but despite the darkness and fear, the audience is immersed in the mysterious beauty of the world.
This is music that confronts dread without surrendering to it. The darkness is real, but so is the act of listening, already a gesture of resistance.
2 Become Ocean for orchestra-2013-42’-YT/Seattle SO-Morlot
Marc’s Note:
Here Adams achieves one of the defining works of our time.
Life emerged from the sea on our planet, but due to global warming polar ice is melting and humans face the prospect to literally become ocean.
The work consists of 40 minutes of long, slow crescendos.
Nothing happens in the conventional sense, yet everything unfolds.
Although the orchestra is divided into three parts and each is moving at its own pace, the slowness and uniformity of rhythm let the listener perceive a single, indivisible motion.
This is one of Adams’s great achievements: independent processes feel unified, like currents within a single body of water.
Dynamics and orchestral layers converge to provide three massive tidal surges. The second represents the greatest surge of sound. From that point onwards the music is played in reverse: the whole piece is a palindrome.
The palindrome structure is more than formal ingenuity. It produces a profound psychological effect:
• The ascent feels inevitable
• The descent feels like memory
Time becomes circular, almost geological.
The music’s slow-motion grandeur evokes both awe and dread: beauty inseparable from fragility. To listen is to feel the earth’s pulse.
Become Ocean is a metaphor, a meditation and an unforgettable experience.
When the final brass drones and harp arpeggios recede, we are left recalibrated, as if our sense of time and scale has been quietly altered.
3 Inuksuit for 9 to 99 players-2009-60’-Spotify/Inuksuit Ensemble-Perkins
Marc’s Note:
This is one of the most radical redefinitions of concert music in recent decades.
Adams has composed many works inspired by the outdoors but heard indoors.
Inuksuit on the other hand is a large-scale work conceived to be performed outside. This is not site-specific music; it is site responsive.
It is inspired by the stone sentinels constructed by the Inuit in the expanses of the Arctic.
Scored for up to ninety-nine percussionists dispersed outdoors, Inuksuit transforms performance into landscape. Sounds of drums, stones and conch shells mingle with wind and birds. The piece dissolves the boundary between composition and environment, reminding us that listening is an ecological communion.
There is no master score, but rather a collection of musical materials and possibilities for musicians, so they can create a unique realisation of the work. The absence of a fixed score is not indeterminacy alone, but distributed authorship.
Listeners can move around freely and discover their own preferred points to navigate the work.
The piece is intended to expand our awareness, not only of musical possibilities but also of ways to transform empty space into more fully experienced space.
It reveals the brevity of human presence against the vast continuum of geological time.
4 Canticles of the Sky for cello ensemble-2015-18’-Spotify/Jensen-Northwestern University Cello Ensemble
Marc’s Note:
Canticles of the Sky is a majestic score for an ensemble of forty-five cellos, a real vibratory wonder. What stands out is Adams’s ability to turn mass into clarity. Forty-five cellos could easily produce density; instead, he creates luminosity.
The four movements are inspired by four arctic moons, the Sonoran Desert Sky and a heaven of stars, which is the Milky Way.
The work unfolds in luminous canons that ascend like columns of air. The texture is transparent, the pacing meditative as the cello’s organ-like drones clear and sharpen the mind.
The listener perceives light filtering through sound: an invocation of stillness and peace.
Adams turns harmony into prayer.
5 SQ-Everything that rises-2017-56’-YT/Jack Qt
Marc’s Note:
Everything that rises is a mysterious, meditative and haunting string quartet, which draws the listener into a suspended, timeless space outside of everyday experience.
The piece grew out of Adams’s Sila a choral/orchestral work and traverses the same territory, but in a more melodic way.
It is an exploration of dissonance and just intonation tuning, which allows for richer harmony and more modulation between keys.
Pure intervals contract as they ascend, subtly bending perception.
A growing atmosphere of tranquillity and timelessness settles in as time floats and the lines spin out until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows. The music does not end; it evaporates into the grain of sound itself.
An epoch-defining piece.
6 SQ-Waves and Particles-2021-53’-YT/Jack Qt
Marc’s Note:
Another shimmery, beautiful and virtuosic string quartet by Adams, this time in six movements.
The composer explores the deeper levels of elemental nature through extraordinary musical expression.
Quantum physics, fractal geometry and noise function as metaphors in this piece.
The quartet is full of remarkable sounds that the composer manages to extract from a conventional string quartet.
The quartet unfolds a spectrum of sonic states: from dense, churning masses to fragile harmonic veils, from trembling instabilities to radiant stillness.
The implicit question in this work is: can we extend our sense of nature beyond the visible world, into its most abstract and elemental dimensions?
Adams makes a strong case here and encourages us to embrace the totality of nature, even down to its elemental particles.
7 Three high Places for cello-2017-17’-Spotify/Coates
Marc’s Note:
These miniatures are dedicated to a deceased friend and challenge the enterprising cellist to create the purest sound possible.
The piece is built entirely from slow-moving natural harmonics and open strings to create a clear, naturally resonant sound.
Here, Adams approaches silence not as absence, but as the medium through which sound becomes visible.
Oliver Coates delivers an exceptional performance.
8 Sila, The breath of the World-2014-57’-Spotify/The Crossing-Jack Qt
Marc’s Note:
Sila is the Inuit word meaning “The Breath of the World” and the title announces an ambitious work.
It is built on deceptively simple material, as it unfolds from the expansion of the overtone series of the introductory B-flat.
There is a large amount of indeterminacy in the score, so no two performances are identical.
It is scored for singers and instruments, including the use of shakers and megaphones.
Like in “Inuksuit”, the audience is free to walk through and around the performers.
Sila emerges from the composer’s experience with aeolian harp recordings, which explains that the unfolding of the piece feels organic.
It comes out of the earth and rises to the sky, floating upward through sixteen harmonic clouds.
Each musician is a soloist, who plays or sings a unique part at her or his own pace. The independence of performers creates a field of simultaneous subjectivities, yet the result feels unified.
The result is both ephemeral and eternal: sound as atmosphere, presence as prayer.
I would like to express my sincere thanks to Mâkhi Xenakis for kindly granting the authorization to reproduce the image of the design created by her father, Iannis Xenakis, for the Polytope de Montréal. Her generosity and support are deeply appreciated.
Marc Bollansee
11 Iannis Xenakis-1922-2001-Greece/France
Primary Forces: Orchestral-Ensemble-Vocal
Encountering the music of Xenakis for the first time can be a disorienting experience. Traditional points of reference such as melody, harmonic progression and thematic development often seem to dissolve into immense sonic architectures, violent eruptions of energy and masses of sound in constant transformation. For some listeners the impact is immediate and overwhelming. Others require time before entering this singular universe.
Yet few composers of the twentieth century transformed the act of listening so radically.
Xenakis approached music not as narrative or psychological discourse, but as the projection of forces in space and time. Sound behaves like a physical phenomenon: it collides, expands, accelerates, fractures and proliferates. The listener no longer follows themes in the traditional sense but is immersed inside evolving sound environments whose intensity can feel geological, cosmic or ritualistic.
This extraordinary physical power partly explains why Xenakis occupies such a unique position in contemporary music. Although his work is often associated with mathematics, architecture and formal systems, the experience of listening to it is never purely intellectual. Beneath the rigorous structures lies a music of elemental energy, deeply connected to nature, movement and collective human expression.
The range of his output is also far broader than is sometimes assumed. Alongside the massive orchestral works stand pieces of haunting stillness, intricate chamber works, spatial environments, electroacoustic experiments and dramatic vocal compositions rooted in ancient Greece. Throughout these transformations, Xenakis continually reinvented his musical language while preserving an unmistakable identity.
More than half a century after many of these works were written, their sound world still feels startlingly contemporary. Xenakis did not merely extend existing musical traditions: he opened new perceptual territories. His music remains a frontier experience, one that continues to challenge performers, listeners and composers alike.
The works presented here attempt to illuminate different facets of this immense creative universe.
1 Terretektorh for orchestra-1965-1966-17’-YT/hr SO-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
After the ground-breaking stochastic works of the fifties, Xenakis started working on Terretektorh, a piece that proposes two fundamental innovations that would revolutionize composition for orchestra and listening possibilities.
90 Musicians are spread out among the public holding their instruments and sitting on an insonorous elevated platforms. The public was seated on folding chairs during the premiere, but was free to change positions in order to get a different experience.
This scattering of the music leads to a cinematic, radically innovative conception of music. Musical composition is enriched in many ways by the spatial dimension and the freedom of movement.
The orchestra is divided in eight groups, containing nearly equal proportions of string and wind instruments. Each player is armed with one of various small percussive instruments like woodblocks, marimbas, whips and small whistle-sirens which possess three registers and produce flame-like sounds.
Orchestral colour is thus moved to the spectre of dry sounds, full of noise, which enlarge the sonorous palette and make the scattering even more effective.
The score largely avoids traditional melody and harmonic progression.
There is however a lot of movement, both directional and stochastic, in dynamics, range density, timbre and spatial location. Movement is designed and calculated with precision by the use of logarithmic functions and Archimedean spirals for rotating sounds.
The percussive textures, including knocking and plucking sounds, add a raw and highly distinctive layer to the orchestral fabric.
Xenakis had a profound relationship with nature and sought here to evoke natural sonic phenomena. This partly explains the mystery of music that remains deeply compelling despite its mathematical foundations: the human and physical dimensions are never absent.
2 Polytope de Montreal-1967-6’-Spotify/Ensemble Ars Nova-Constant
Marc’s Note:
Xenakis designed the famous Philips Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Brussels in 1958 and his mentor, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier conceived a show with music by Varese and the projection of films and slides.
The composer was disappointed as he had started to visualize a radical light and sound show which would fit perfectly in the structure he had designed and which had no centre, no privileged vantage point.
The architect for the French Pavilion at the Montreal World Exhibition of 1967 was Jean Faugeron, whose design was several stories high, with an open interior space accessible on all levels.
Ideal conditions for Xenakis, who constructed five networks of intersecting steel cables each outlining curved geometrical shapes. The steel cables gave shape to the enormous void and supported his luminous points, which consisted of flashbulbs.
All his previous experiences were used to work with light: the calculation of probabilities, logical and group structures.
There were 1200 independent circuits (or lights) functioning through a board of photo-electrical cells where they were all reproduced.
The luminous composition is organized according to group theory principles.
Examples of these groups are: vertical and horizontal slices, differentiation in superposed layers, different lighting for each storey.
Xenakis wanted to create a luminous flow analogous to that of music. Therefore, the flashbulbs were triggered twenty-five times per second to achieve the necessary sense of continuity.
Xenakis insisted that the music should not merely illustrate the visual spectacle but remain structurally independent from it.
His music is a continuity, often with glissandi as building blocks, while the light is a multitude of points with stops and starts.
The composer has written a purely instrumental score, which is scored for four identical ensembles.
It shows some likeness with Terretektorh as the emphasis is on relatively static sonorities interspersed with dynamic fluctuations.
There are three contrasting sections and each of them contains sonic elements, spatialized according to different patterns and rates.
Intensity is the key feature of the music which is filled with registral extremes, dramatic accents and dynamic gestures.
Polytope de Montreal was a perfect symbiosis of architectural space and musical structures.
In this multimedia show the architect, composer, mathematician and specialist in electric connections join forces.
Quite a feat for one person.
3 Kraanerg for orchestra and tape-1968-1969-83’-YT/Ensemble 900-Tamayo
Marc’s Note:
Commissioned by the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, Xenakis was asked to compose a large-scale score for a ballet by Roland Petit and was granted complete artistic freedom.
There was no real plot for the ballet but Xenakis was conscious of the student demonstrations that took place during that period and extended the sense of intellectual struggle to global concerns.
The composer had developed a new framework for the structural organization of his music based on mathematical group theory and applied this theory to his compositional process.
He identified six categories of elements: timbres, register and pitch, sound quality, dynamic level, density, textures.
By multiplying the number of elements in each category together one can determine the huge range of possible combinations.
Kraanerg is a vast, continuous structure lasting 75 minutes and is built from the material alternating between recorded sounds on tape and a live orchestra. The tape consists of processed orchestral sounds that are similar to the live material.
There is a dialogue between these two elements but also a sub-dialogue between winds and strings in the live part. Xenakis wrote separate scores for winds and strings.
The music is full of extraordinary tension; it is even relentless as it unfolds in clearly outlined sound masses.
Dense textures, extremes of register and dynamics, aggressive accents and articulations combine with a constantly evolving structure which creates a very high concentration.
Moreover, Xenakis introduced silence in the form of about 20 pauses, including three that last at least 20 seconds.
The interaction of elements and the variation of their proportions contributed to making the music unpredictable.
In the last stages of the piece, the waves of taped material, always in contrast to the live sound, build to a peak like a force of nature.
Xenakis worked with limited musical material which guaranteed coherence and formal integrity.
The original choreography failed to secure a lasting place but a new choreography by Graeme Murphy in 1988 better reflected the awesome sweep of the music.
Kraanerg remains a key work in Xenakis’s repertoire.
4 Keqrops for piano and orchestra-1986-16’-YT/Dubov-State Academy SO of Russia-Lednev
Marc’s Note:
The title refers to Cecrops, the mythical half-man, half-serpent king ot Athens and also evokes the idea of interweaving musical layers.The dual nature of the title is reflected in one of Xenakis’s most aggressive creations, full of rhythmic energy, textural intensity and formal tension. Although the piano is rarely isolated in traditional cadenzas, the soloist plays almost continuously. It is a score of enormous difficulty for the soloist, who plays the most active music, particularly its recurring scales and active gestures. The orchestra plays mostly very concentrated material. Xenakis makes a lot of use of his sieve technique which is providing a harmonic anchor in the middle section. The sieve structures shift rapidly from one configuration to another. The final section provides a sense of structural coherence which is often absent in music of such intensity and volcanic energy. The orchestra gradually coalesces into a monumental cluster sonority while the piano recalls the chordal ostinato heard at the opening of the work, bringing the piece full circle.
5 Jonchaies for 18 musicians-1977-17’-YT/Luxemburg PO-Tamayo
Marc’s Note:
Jonchaies is one of Xenakis’s most imposing orchestral works and also one of his richest in sonorous invention. The title refers to a dense field of reeds and perfectly captures the organic proliferation that characterizes the music. The work opens in a strikingly unexpected manner. Instead of the brutal sound masses often associated with Xenakis, the strings unfold long, sinuous melodic lines of great intensity and continuity. The sonority is partly inspired by the Javanese pelog scale whose unequal intervals fascinated the composer. Xenakis attempted to recreate and expand this harmonic world through his sieve system, a method allowing him to organize pitch structures according to mathematical filtering processes. The result is one of the most compelling orchestral textures in his output. The string writing possesses an almost hypnotic quality as the melodic lines accumulate into vast shifting clouds of sound. Despite the complexity of the underlying construction, the music retains an immediately physical and sensual presence. As the work progresses, the orchestral landscape gradually changes character. Pulsating blocks of sound emerge and circulate through different instrumental groups in alternation, creating waves of energy and spatial tension. The music becomes increasingly dynamic and ritualistic, driven by sharp accents, repeated figures and violent orchestral surges. The brass section plays a particularly important role in the later stages of the work. Massive glissandi cut through the orchestral fabric like tectonic movements, while the rhythmic pulsations generate an atmosphere of mounting pressure and instability. Xenakis achieves an extraordinary balance between rigorous architectural control and the impression of unleashed natural forces. The conclusion is among the most remarkable in Xenakis’s orchestral music. After the accumulation of dense masses and explosive gestures, the texture rises toward the highest registers where the piccolos emit shrill chirping sounds that evoke a strange avian world or the cries of invisible creatures. The gigantic orchestral machine suddenly dissolves into nervous fragments of sound and air. Jonchaies stands at the crossroads of several aspects of Xenakis’s art: the mathematical organization of pitch through sieves, the fascination with natural phenomena, the physical projection of sound masses and the creation of orchestral textures of overwhelming intensity. It remains one of the composer’s supreme achievements for large orchestra.
6 Akrata for 16 wind instruments-1964-1965-14’-Spotify/EIC Paris-Simonovitch
Marc’s Note:
Akrata is written for eight woodwinds and eight brass instruments.
Traditional melody or harmonic progression do not appear in this work as its sonic material is forged of held pitches largely detached from traditional intervallic relationships. The focus is entirely on parameters such as timbre, dynamics and texture.
Its architecture is extra-temporal, based on the theory of groups of transformation, in particular the theory of sieves by which structures of pitch and time may be developed, like scales or pitches in ordered sets as well as temporal structures.
Instead of ordering notes through algorithms, like in the stochastic works, the new theory allows transformation to point to a succession of musical events. In Akrata one hears series of moments separated by silences.
The piece evokes gong colours and the blurred and multifaceted sounds converge towards forms which are designed beyond the wind ensemble giving the piece it’s out of time feeling.
The percussive character of the playing techniques (flutter-tongue, staccato, tight tremolo) lends a sharp and contrasted relief to the musical canvas.
Many consider the work to be a sketch that prepares the masterpieces that follow like Kraanerg and Nomos Alpha, but the purity of the subject and the held note impart a stark, radical expression to the music that appeals to listeners on a different level.
The architecture of Akrata results from a partly systematized process but it is a harbinger of a new deterministic approach in Xenakis’s oeuvre.
Simonovitch conducts his friend’s piece with the perfect slow pacing it craves.
7 Echange for bass clarinet and ensemble-1989-18’-YT/Freedman-Ensemble Asko Schönberg-Masson
Marc’s Note:
Echange occupies a unique place in Xenakis’s output as one of his rare concertante works for woodwind instrument. The composer sets out to make full use of the richly sonorous qualities of the instrument. Its resonance and harmonic qualities enable Xenakis to establish a special sensuality in the solo instrument, which engages in a dialogue with the ensemble. The splendid cadenza favors lyricism and sonorous exploration over sheer virtuosity. The soloist is featured almost continuously, while the involvement of the ensemble builds a structural momentum. At one stage, the ensemble briefly drops out, allowing the bass clarinet to make an extraordinary, unprecedented gesture: a major triad. An unexpectedly humorous gesture that is quite unusual for the rigorous composer. After a dancelike passage for the ensemble, the soloist spins long, smooth melodic contours and quickly alternates between registers. Again the ensemble accompanies with tutti chords. A fascinating widespread chord closes the piece and the instruments stop playing one after the other, leaving the high strings the task to bring the piece to a delicate conclusion. The success of the piece depends greatly on the soloist and Lori Freedman’ s long familiarity with the score results in a truly exemplary interpretation.
8 Nomos Alpha for cello-1965-1966-13’-YT/Rohan de Saram
Marc’s Note:
Whereas sieve theory appears in embryonic form in Akrata, Xenakis was fully in command of the technique in Nomos Alpha, his timeless masterpiece for solo cello
Ordered structures could be constructed and then subjected to a controlled sequence of permutations.
In addition, Nomos Alpha exemplifies an elaborate group structure based on the twenty-four rotations of a cube.
The score is substantial, but the music is highly fragmented and places exceptional demands on the cellist.
A great range of technical possibilities is explored, including double-stop glissandi, rapid con legno battuto and scordatura. The latter encourages Rohan de Saram to alternate 2 pre-tuned cellos to avoid lengthy re-tunings which would also change bow resistance and response. Moreover, Xenakis often writes immediately demanding material after the scordatura indication, leaving no recovery time.
Each scordatura effectively creates a new instrument as the resonance network changes completely. Xenakis was very sensitive to the physical-acoustic transformations: he thought in terms of masses, resonant states and sonic topology rather than traditional themes.
The piece is another major step forward in his approach to composition as the structures, values and relations are linked with temporal trajectories of various elements and parameters.
The result is a unique blend of compositional and instrumental concerns which create a musical experience of immense power.
One can safely say that each execution can showcase a different approach or reading of the piece. The performances of Palm, de Saram, Roy and Deforce demonstrate that Nomos Alpha still exceeds the full technical grasp of any single interpreter. Each performer uncovers different dimensions of the work and contributes to its evolving history.
9 Oresteia for baritone/countertenor, choir, percussion and ensemble-1965-1966-78’-YT/Scotting- UC Consortia-De Hart-UC School of Music Staff and Students-Menzies
Marc’s Note:
After composing incidental music for a Greek production of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Xenakis quickly assembled a shorter suite containing choral and percussion sections from the score.
Two later additions: Cassandra (1987) and Athena (1992) incorporate solo voices, which enhance the dramatic impact of the later stage versions. These additions belong to a distinct aesthetic, a kind of homage to No theatre, where all the parts are sung by men.
The complements were written for the baritone Spyros Sakkas who often sang in falsetto. In the version recommended here, the singer alternates counter-tenor and baritone sounds, producing striking dramatic contrasts.
Vocal settings for the choruses range from speech-like chanting to modal monodies, two-part counterpoint, quartal harmonies and loud yelling and howling.
The singers were also requested to play small percussion instruments, introducing stochastic clouds of extraordinary sonorities.
There is much use of microtonal harmonies, glissandi and timbral-registral interplay in the instrumental parts.
Instrumental sections function as a temporal backdrop, while dramatic events and vocal expressions take place before it.
Xenakis keeps his usual exuberance in check and does not allow the music to dominate, thereby compressing the dramatic content, so that the ultimate crisis unfolds in full force.
12 Giacinto Scelsi-1905-1988-Italy
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Chamber, Piano, Solo
Giacinto Scelsi occupies a singular position in twentieth-century music. Although often associated with mysticism and esoteric thought, the true importance of his work lies above all in his revolutionary transformation of musical listening itself.
After an artistic and psychological crisis in the late 1940s, Scelsi progressively abandoned traditional compositional thinking based on thematic development, harmonic progression and architectural form. Instead, he began to explore the interior life of single sounds, discovering that a single note was never truly static but contained an entire universe of movement, tension, colour and energy.
This discovery altered the course of contemporary music.
Scelsi shifted the focus of composition from the external organization of sounds toward the exploration of sound as living matter. Microtonal fluctuations, beating frequencies, glissandi, unstable timbres and internal resonances became the essential substance of his music.
What appears simple on the surface is in reality extraordinarily complex. Beneath the apparent stasis, the music is in perpetual transformation. Tiny changes of register, bow pressure, dynamics or tuning generate immense expressive consequences.
His mature works often possess a ritualistic or ceremonial dimension. Yet this spirituality is never merely decorative or symbolic. It emerges directly from the physical behaviour of sound itself. Scelsi does not illustrate transcendence: he attempts to reveal it acoustically.
His orchestral works such as, Quattro Pezzi, Uaxuctum, Anahit and Konx-Om-Pax opened entirely new conceptions of orchestral sound, while his string writing transformed the possibilities of instrumental microtonality and resonance.
Many later composers absorbed aspects of his discoveries, including Radulescu, Grisey, Murail, Haas, Niblock, Sciarrino and numerous younger composers concerned with spectral, microtonal or sound-based composition. Yet none entirely resemble him because Scelsi’s music remains deeply personal and impossible to reduce to a technique or system.
At its greatest, his music gives the impression that sound itself has become conscious.
1 Quattro Pezzi for orchestra-1959-17’-Spotify/Vienna Radio SO-Rundel
Marc’s Note:
After his previous experiments with the piano, Scelsi extends them for the first time with a larger formation.
Quattro Pezzi is the pioneering work that opens the way for all his mature orchestral works.
The piece is for 26 instruments and favours low register instruments.
Certain instruments are absent in the three first movements, but all of them are present in the fourth and last movement which is a crowning achievement that synthesizes all preceding processes.
Each movement uses a different, single note modulated from within.
Sound material is simultaneously form and work, which was a revolution of unprecedented depth.
A compositional process takes place within the sound instead of the traditional combination of sounds.
The pieces elaborate their single notes by variations in tessitura, dynamics and timbre and also introduces microtonal fluctuations.
Climaxes appear in these domains and are derived from the golden ratio.
At times there is a flow in the music, but sometimes it halts in a glimpse of cosmic motion. Orchestral internal motion is the real miracle of the piece, while the “One note concept” is historically important.
Beating frequencies, tiny shifts in register and the use of colour to create tension are new elements that will later be absorbed by composers like Radulescu, Grisey, Haas or Szlavnics.
Each movement has a special characteristic: the first is melodic, the second dramatic, the third ethereal and the last one has an extreme finality.
The spontaneity of “Quattro Pezzi” and the sheer vitality of its sound processes make traditional formal constraints feel irrelevant.
2 Violin Concerto-Anahit-1965-YT -13-YT/Tosi-EIC-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
Anahit is the ancient Egyptian name for Venus.
It is one of the few concertante works by Scelsi, but it is not a traditional violin concerto, rather a poem wherein the violin has purely sonorous tasks.
One year earlier he composed Xnoybis, his masterpiece for solo violin and Anahit develops its conquests and uses scordatura which allows the listener to hear the same note simultaneously on different strings.
The violin is tuned in a certain way that produces beats in the juxtaposition of certain intervals accompanied by the dense orchestral vegetation.
Anahit is one of Scelsi’s most refined creations and clearly refers to the divine. The violin is priestess, medium and a disembodied voice.
The music often seems to hover on the threshold between material sound and pure resonance.
There are three distinct sections which are built on the golden section.
The work is very lyrical and the soloist focuses on microtonal development and is supported in harmony by the orchestral accompaniment.
In the first movement the violin works out an ascending line, followed by an interlude dominated by brass at the golden section and ending with a more subdued interlude.
A major highlight of the piece is the following ethereal cadenza, which requires intense concentration from the soloist.
After the cadenza, the composer recapitulates material of the first section and then lets pulsating waves bring the music to its conclusion.
3 Uaxuctum for chorus, ondes Martenot and orchestra-1966-23’/Radio France Choir & Orch-Brizzi
Marc’s Note:
The title refers to the legend of the Maya City destroyed by its inhabitants for religious reasons.
In this piece Scelsi moves closer to pure ceremony rather than composition.
It is a complex, dramatic and incredible work for choir and orchestra in five movements.
The score for the chorus is written at an astonishingly difficult level and incorporates many varieties of microtonal manipulations next to breathing, guttural and nasal sounds.
Concerning the orchestra, it is the only piece by Scelsi in which the Ondes Martenot intervene and are entrusted with important solo parts.
The first movement begins in quiet contemplation, only to be interrupted by the violent mystical intervention of the chorus and then sinks back into meditative tones.
In the second movement we really enter the world of the Mayans and Scelsi develops his mystic side in an orchestral tour-de-force.
A special third movement opens in an atmosphere of foreboding and after a short silence the city is destroyed and abandoned. Despite its briefness it is the heart of the work with its brutal sparks of percussion and its uneven flow.
The next movement is dominated by the chorus and tries to make us imagine the wisdom gained by the Mayans after their courageous act. It starts a capella and lets the orchestra enter discreetly and progressively, to recede at the end.
The incantatory and obsessive sides of the second movement return. And rapid percussion evoking tablas give this elaborate movement a contrasting rhythmic element.
In the final movement Scelsi returns to the opening mood and gives us a recollection of the preceding events.
Soli and choirs remain constantly in the foreground, while the orchestra rises slowly to a summit of intensity, remains in sustained tutti, to fade away until the mysterious end. The return to silence is not merely atmospheric: silence itself becomes sacred space again.
The contrast between Anahit and Uaxuctum is enormous: the former is tender, intimate, transparent, transfigured while the latter is dramatic, flamboyant, contrasted and manifold.
4 Konx-Om-Pax for chorus and large orchestra-1974-18’-YT/Cracovia Radio-TV Orch-Wyttenbach
Marc’s Note:
The title of the piece refers to peace and is borrowed from three languages: Assyrian, Sanskrit and Latin.
It is Scelsi’s last piece with extended movements and large forms and is scored for large orchestra with full strings and organ. The chorus appears in the last of the three movements.
It is no coincidence that there are full strings as the composer wanted to assert his command of harmony and invent sound complexes, full of breathtaking beauty and expressive power.
Full harmonic complexes and glissandos abound in the first movement, which is entirely based on C.
Next comes a movement for the ages, lasting a mere two minutes, a real whirlwind of sound sweeping everything away.
The last, grandiose movement is among Scelsi’s most outstanding creations.
A chorus repeats the sacred syllable “Om” and the whole universe starts resonating and vibrating. The composer is a real master at liberating energy hidden inside sound and does it with extraordinary elementary power.
“Om” signifies peace and Scelsi aims at the surpassing of self and man’s union with the cosmos.
It certainly is the composer’s most metaphysical orchestral statement.
The monumental pacing of the work is essential and it unfolds slowly allowing the listener to enter a peaceful state.
5 SQ 4-1964-12’-YT/Quartetto Maurice
Marc’s Note:
In this work Scelsi uses string-by-string tablature notation for the first time and he thus achieves an orchestral view of quartet writing.
Sixteen strings become individual instruments with their own colour, which leads to an endlessly increasing subtleness of the sounds’ differentiation and a great richness of tone.
The quartet is another work based on the golden section and symmetric principles.
It is scored in one movement and is hyper-concentrated with fascinating elements like glissandi, tremor, unstable intervals and microtonal friction.
Pitch is no longer treated as a fixed point but as a living field of tensions, frictions and oscillations.
Scelsi was particularly proud of his fourth quartet and it is indeed a crowning achievement not only in his work, but in all quartet literature.
6 Kshara for 2 double basses-1975-9’-YT/Runyon-Kasten-Krause
Marc’s Note:
After 1974, Scelsi abandoned large orchestral forms and turned increasingly toward very small instrumental formations, often exploring the deepest and darkest regions of sound. The double bass became one of his privileged instruments because of its immense resonance and physical presence.
Kshara, written for two double basses, is among the most extreme realizations of this late style. The title refers to the transient and perishable aspect of existence in Indian philosophy, opposed to the immutable eternal principle.
Initially many performers recorded one bass part beforehand and played the second part live. The proposed version is performed by two players and reveals more clearly the unstable interaction between the instruments.
The music unfolds in very slow transformations of texture, register and microtonal tension. Tiny deviations in pitch generate beating frequencies and acoustic frictions that constantly alter the sound from within.
The low rumble often approaches the threshold of audibility and creates an almost subterranean vibration. One does not simply listen to the piece: one experiences it physically through the body.
Despite its austerity, Kshara is not static music. Beneath the apparent immobility the sound is in perpetual internal motion, as if hidden energies were slowly circulating inside matter itself.
7 Xnoybis for violin-1964-12’-YT/Tosi
Marc’s Note:
Xnoybis is one of Scelsi’s supreme achievements for solo instrument and one of the most radical violin works of the twentieth century.
Like the Fourth String Quartet, the piece uses string-by-string notation and extensive scordatura, allowing Scelsi to treat each string as an independent sound world with its own resonance, colour and tension.
Scored in three movements, the work evolves almost entirely through microtonal fluctuations, unstable intervals, glissandi and variations of bow pressure. Traditional melodic development virtually disappears and is replaced by the exploration of the inner life of sound itself.
The violin no longer functions as a lyrical instrument in the classical sense. It becomes a medium for the revelation of hidden acoustic phenomena: vibrations, pulsations, friction and resonance.
The music demands extreme concentration from both performer and listener because the smallest inflection becomes structurally decisive. Silence, attack, timbre and pitch instability acquire equal importance.
Due to its formidable technical and psychological demands, Xnoybis has only been mastered by a limited number of violinists. Yet its influence on later string writing has been immense, particularly in music concerned with microtonality and the physical behaviour of sound.
8 Ygghur for cello-1965-16’-Spotify/Uitti
Marc’s Note:
Ygghur is the final part of Scelsi’s vast cello trilogy, The three Ages of Man, a cycle that can be understood as a spiritual and psychological self-portrait of the composer.
While the two earlier parts of the trilogy often inhabit dark and tormented territories, Ygghur reaches a more transfigured and inward state.
The first movement possesses an intense poignancy and unfolds in long, concentrated gestures where every inflection of pitch and colour seems charged with expressive meaning.
The second movement echoes many earlier aspects of Scelsi’s musical world: ritualistic suspensions, gong-like resonances, fragmentary cries and disembodied sonorities that seem detached from ordinary instrumental behaviour.
The final movement, entitled “Catharsis,” is among the most restrained and visionary pages Scelsi ever wrote for strings. Played largely in the high register, it unfolds through slow microtonal glissandi and fragile oscillations that anticipate the extreme refinement of his late works.
The cello gradually seems to lose its material weight and become pure resonance suspended in space.
Ygghur is not only the conclusion of the trilogy, but also one of Scelsi’s clearest affirmations that the deepest musical expression may arise from the smallest possible transformations of sound.
13 Ying Wang-1976-China
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble
Ying Wang belongs to that relatively small group of contemporary composers whose music immediately reveals an individual sonic identity without ever falling into mannerism. Born in Shanghai and later formed artistically in Germany and at IRCAM in Paris, she has developed a language in which physical sound energy, timbral transformation, electronics and dramaturgical tension coexist in a highly organic way. Her work is neither “East-West fusion” in the superficial sense nor an academic exercise in sound research. Instead, it emerges as a deeply personal response to displacement, technological modernity, political anxiety and the instability of contemporary existence.
Her music often gives the impression of being in permanent mutation. Textures flow, dissolve and reassemble; instrumental colors are constantly destabilized; pulses appear only to vanish into friction, noise or resonance. Yet despite the sophistication of her techniques, the listener rarely experiences the music as abstract. There is almost always an underlying physicality and emotional pressure in her work, sometimes violent, sometimes contemplative, sometimes strangely fragile.
One of the remarkable aspects of Wang’s output is her ability to combine highly controlled structural thinking with a sense of raw immediacy. Even in her most electronically informed pieces, one feels the presence of gesture, breath and bodily movement. The sonic material often behaves like living matter: expanding, contaminating itself, colliding, decaying and regenerating.
Another important aspect is her relationship with sound space. Wang does not simply orchestrate; she sculpts acoustic perspective. Sounds emerge from depth, migrate through layers of density and transparency, and frequently create the sensation that the listener is moving inside a volatile sonic environment rather than observing a traditional musical discourse.
Her music also reflects a world shaped by acceleration, fragmentation and ecological uncertainty. Titles such as Re:Wilding, Schmutz, Copyleft or 528 HZ 8 va already suggest that Wang is interested not only in sound itself but also in the cultural, technological and political contexts surrounding sound production today. She is among those composers who understand that contemporary composition can no longer remain isolated from questions of media, digital circulation, environmental collapse and transformed human perception.
Stylistically, one could situate her at the crossroads of several traditions without reducing her to any of them. Certain works reveal traces of Lachenmann’s expanded instrumental thinking, the spectral concern for timbral evolution, and the post-industrial energy of composers fascinated by urban and technological noise. Yet her music remains unmistakably her own because of its fluid dramaturgy, its kinetic energy and its highly distinctive sense of sonic atmosphere.
What makes Ying Wang particularly interesting today is that she composes neither against technology nor in submission to it. Electronics, amplification and multimedia elements are integrated as natural extensions of instrumental thought. Her work suggests a world in which acoustic and electronic realities have already merged irreversibly.
In many respects, Wang’s music is music of transformation: transformation of timbre, transformation of perception, transformation of identity and transformation of the environment itself. Beneath the surface complexity lies a persistent existential tension; between control and chaos, transparency and opacity, nature and artificiality, memory and technological mutation.
1 Unermüdlich strömend, nahezu transparent for orchestra-2013-16‘-YT/ORF Radio SO Wien-Alsop
Marc’s Note:
This orchestral work can be heard as one of Wang’s earliest major statements of artistic maturity. The title itself “Tirelessly flowing, almost transparent” already reveals an essential duality in her music: continuous movement combined with extreme fragility.
The piece was inspired by the river Havel and by the composer’s perception of a dark, mysterious natural force hidden beneath an apparently calm surface. Rather than depicting nature in a descriptive or impressionistic manner, Wang transforms the river into a dynamic sonic process. The orchestra behaves less like a traditional symphonic organism than like an unstable ecosystem of currents, eddies and pressure zones.
One of the most striking aspects of the work is its control of density. Wang continuously alternates between highly saturated orchestral masses and moments of near-weightless transparency. Timbres appear to dissolve into microscopic particles before reassembling into larger accumulations of sound. This constant metamorphosis creates the sensation of listening to a living fluid structure.
The dramatic power of the piece does not depend on thematic development in the classical sense. Instead, tension emerges from transformations of texture, tempo and spatial depth. Rhythm is unstable and often internally fractured. Sudden surges of energy interrupt suspended states, suggesting hidden violence beneath the apparent calmness of the musical surface.
One can also hear in this work Wang’s fascination with materiality. Sound is treated almost physically: granular string textures, shifting orchestral layers and unstable harmonic spectra create a tactile experience. The listener is drawn into a sonic environment rather than guided through a linear narrative.
2 528 HZ 8 va for orchestra, minimoog and electronics-2021-2022-21’-YT/SWR SO-SWR Experimental Studio-Mayrhofer
Marc’s Note:
This work marks an important stage in Wang’s engagement with electronics, amplified sonorities and questions of acoustic perception. The title refers to the controversial idea of “528 Hz” as a supposedly healing or transformational frequency, but Wang’s treatment of the concept is far from naïve or mystical.
Rather than presenting a meditative “new age” atmosphere, the work interrogates the contemporary obsession with frequencies, vibrations and digitally mediated perception. The integration of mini-Moog, electric guitar, electronics and large orchestra creates a hybrid sound world in which acoustic and electronic identities constantly contaminate one another.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the piece is the ambiguity between organic resonance and artificial manipulation. Certain passages seem almost physically immersive, as if the orchestra itself were becoming an electronic instrument. Elsewhere, distorted sonorities and amplified textures create a sensation of instability and technological interference.
The “8va” extension in the title suggests elevation, displacement or altered register. Indeed, much of the work explores vertical expansion: spectral stretching, exaggerated resonance fields and extreme registral layering. Wang frequently pushes the orchestra into zones where instrumental color becomes unstable and partially electronic in character.
The dramaturgy is highly kinetic. Blocks of sound collide, dissolve and mutate. Unlike traditional symphonic discourse, the music evolves through energetic transformation rather than thematic argumentation.
The work can also be interpreted as a reflection on contemporary listening itself. In a world saturated with digitally manipulated sound, Wang seems to question what constitutes natural resonance today.
3 Coffee and Tea for ensemble and electronics-2013-11’-YT/Mam. Manufaktur für aktuelle Musik
Marc’s Note:
This chamber work with electronics reveals another side of Wang’s personality: humor, theatricality and subtle social observation.
The title immediately evokes everyday ritual and cultural exchange. Coffee and tea are not merely beverages here; they function as symbols of different temporalities, habits and modes of social interaction. One could even interpret the piece as a miniature study in globalization and intercultural coexistence.
Musically, the work juxtaposes contrasting energies and textures. There is often a playful friction between repetitive rhythmic gestures and unstable electronic interventions. The electronics do not simply accompany the instruments; they disturb, distort and occasionally parody the acoustic material.
The piece demonstrates Wang’s talent for transforming ordinary cultural references into complex sonic dramaturgy. Beneath the surface wit lies a sophisticated exploration of gesture, pacing and behavioral patterns.
An especially interesting aspect is the relationship between intimacy and fragmentation. Chamber textures create proximity, yet the electronic layer introduces distance and artificiality. The listener moves constantly between recognizable human gestures and technologically mediated sound objects.
4 Glissadulation for ensemble-2014-2015-8’-Spotify/Ensemble Phoenix Basel
Marc’s Note:
The title itself is highly revealing. By combining “glissando” with a quasi-biological or playful suffix, Wang invents a word suggesting continuous sliding transformation.
Indeed, the work is fundamentally concerned with unstable motion. Pitch in this piece rarely remains fixed. Sounds bend, slide, smear and mutate continuously. The result is a music of permanent transition in which identity itself becomes fluid.
What is particularly remarkable is Wang’s ability to transform glissandi from mere effects into structural principles. Entire formal trajectories emerge from the accumulation and interaction of sliding energies.
The piece also demonstrates her acute sensitivity to micro-instability. Tiny deviations of pitch, friction between instrumental layers and gradual timbral deformation become major expressive elements.
One can hear affinities with spectral thinking, yet Wang’s approach remains more physical and gestural. The glissandi are not purely harmonic phenomena; they often feel like bodily movements, stretches or fractures.
Electronics further destabilize the sonic field by blurring the distinction between acoustic continuity and digitally transformed resonance.
The work creates a fascinating paradox: despite the constant movement, there is also a strange sense of suspended time. The listener becomes immersed in an environment where stable orientation disappears.
5 Schmutz for violin and ensemble-2018-2019-13’-YT/Schafleitner-Klangforum Wien-Leroy
Marc’s Note:
Few contemporary titles are as provocative and revealing as SCHMUTZ (“dirt,” “filth,” “impurity”). The work appears to confront directly the aesthetics of contamination, excess and sonic pollution.
Rather than pursuing purity of sound, Wang embraces friction, distortion and residue. Noise is not treated as opposition to musical material but as an essential component of reality itself.
The violin, traditionally associated with refinement and lyrical expression, is placed within an environment of unstable, often abrasive textures. This tension between virtuosity and contamination becomes central to the work’s dramatic identity.
The music often gives the impression of systems breaking down or overloading. Layers accumulate aggressively; gestures become fragmented; sonic debris circulates through the ensemble. Yet the piece is carefully controlled. Wang does not celebrate chaos blindly; she composes the behavior of disorder.
The use of megaphones and electronics reinforces the political and social dimension of the work. Communication appears distorted, amplified and corrupted. One might hear the piece as reflecting contemporary media saturation, environmental toxicity or the impossibility of maintaining “clean” boundaries in modern life.
At a deeper level, Schmutz questions aesthetic hierarchy itself. Why should impurity be excluded from musical beauty? Wang transforms dirt into compositional material.
6 Re:Wilding for chamber orchestra-2020-22’-Spotify/Ensemble Reflektor-Bar Avni
Marc’s Note:
This is perhaps one of Wang’s most conceptually resonant works. The title immediately invokes ecological discourse and the idea of restoring uncontrolled natural processes.
Yet the piece is not simply “about nature.” Rather, it explores the tension between wildness and technological mediation. Electronics, amplified instruments and orchestral textures coexist in a landscape that feels simultaneously organic and artificial.
The prefix “RE:” is particularly important. It suggests return, reconstruction, reactivation or even digital communication. Thus “rewilding” becomes ambiguous: can nature truly return once it has been technologically transformed?
The music often behaves like an unstable ecosystem. Sonic events proliferate unpredictably, textures spread organically and rhythmic structures seem partially self-generating. Yet one also senses invisible systems of control.
An important feature is Wang’s treatment of sonic space. Sounds emerge from multiple depths and directions, creating an immersive environment rather than a frontal musical narrative.
The integration of video expands the ecological dimension beyond purely acoustic experience. Wang appears interested in how environmental perception itself is mediated through screens, technologies and fragmented attention.
The piece can also be interpreted politically. “Rewilding” here may imply resistance against excessive control, homogenization and digital standardization.
7 SQ-Copyleft-2021-17’-Spotify/Quatuor Diotima
Marc’s Note:
This string quartet with loudspeakers engages directly with questions of authorship, circulation and ownership in the digital age.
The title references the open-source concept of “copyleft,” which opposes restrictive copyright structures by allowing creative material to circulate freely under certain conditions.
For a composer deeply engaged with electronics and technological culture, this is an especially meaningful subject. The piece appears to question how musical identity survives in an era of endless reproduction, sampling and redistribution.
The string quartet, one of the most historically charged forms in Western music, becomes a fascinating site for this interrogation. Wang places the traditional acoustic ensemble inside an electronically mediated environment, effectively confronting historical continuity with digital fragmentation.
The loudspeakers function not merely as accompaniment but as agents of duplication, distortion and spatial multiplication. Musical gestures seem copied, displaced or transformed through technological mediation.
There is also an implicit critique of originality itself. Wang seems to recognize that contemporary culture is built upon layers of quotation, replication and circulation.
At the same time, the work retains strong physical immediacy. The friction between live performers and electronically reproduced sound creates a powerful dramaturgical tension.
8 Focus- Exchange for bass clarinet and electronics-2015-15’-YT/Janssen-Deinzer
Marc’s Note:
This work for bass clarinet and electronics is particularly interesting because it concentrates many of Wang’s broader concerns into a highly focused instrumental situation.
The bass clarinet already occupies an ambiguous sonic territory: dark, flexible, capable of both lyricism and noise. Wang exploits this ambiguity fully.
The notion of “exchange” is central. The electronics and instrumental performer appear engaged in a continuous negotiation of identity. Sometimes the electronics seem to extend the instrument; elsewhere they compete with it, imitate it or destabilize it.
Attention itself becomes part of the composition. The listener’s focus is constantly redirected between foreground and background, acoustic and electronic source, gesture and resonance.
The piece also reveals Wang’s fascination with thresholds. Sounds frequently hover between categories: tone and breath, pitch and noise, human gesture and machine process.
Unlike many works combining solo instrument and electronics, Focus-Exchange avoids simple opposition between human and machine. Instead, the two domains gradually hybridize.
This creates an almost psychological dimension. The electronics sometimes behave like an externalized subconscious of the performer, amplifying hidden resonances and unstable sonic shadows.
14 Helmut Lachenmann-1935-Germany
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber
Lachenmann occupies a unique position in post-war music. While many composers sought new harmonies, new structures, or new technologies, he asked a more fundamental question: what is a musical sound?
His answer transformed contemporary music. Traditional instrumental techniques were no longer sufficient. Bow pressure, friction, breath noise, scraping, tapping, and countless intermediate states became legitimate musical material. What emerged was not simply an expansion of technique but an entirely new listening culture.
Lachenmann’s concept of musique concrète instrumentale treats instruments not as producers of notes but as physical objects capable of generating an enormous spectrum of sound phenomena. The listener is invited to hear not only the result but also the effort that produces it. Energy, resistance, and physical action become audible.
Yet Lachenmann is often misunderstood. Beneath the unconventional sounds lies a composer deeply connected to the great German tradition. Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Mahler remain important presences throughout his work. His music is not a rejection of history but a confrontation with it. Familiar gestures are dismantled and rebuilt so that they may be heard anew.
What distinguishes Lachenmann from many experimental composers is the extraordinary expressive power that emerges from this approach. His works are rarely cold. They often possess a dramatic intensity, a tension between destruction and memory, between noise and beauty. The listener experiences not merely new sounds but a new awareness of listening itself.
Few composers have altered our perception of instrumental music as profoundly as Lachenmann. His achievement is not simply a new style but a new mode of hearing.
1 Air for percussion and large orchestra-1968-1969 rev. 1994-19’-YT/Dierstein-State Orch Stuttgart-Zagrosek
Marc’s Note:
One of the earliest large-scale manifestations of Lachenmann’s mature language, Air explores sound as a field of forces rather than a collection of pitches. Percussion and orchestra interact in a constantly shifting landscape where attacks, resonances, and textures become the true protagonists.
The work already demonstrates Lachenmann’s fascination with physical energy. Sounds emerge, collide, and dissipate as though governed by natural processes. Traditional orchestral rhetoric is largely absent; instead, the listener encounters a world in which every sonic event possesses equal importance.Air represents the moment when Lachenmann begins to move decisively beyond post-war serialism toward his own revolutionary conception of sound.
2 Fassade for orchestra-1973 rev. 1987-22’-Spotify/SWR SO Baden-Baden und Freiburg-Gielen
Fassade is one of Lachenmann’s most radical examinations of instrumental sound. The title suggests a surface or exterior wall, yet the work constantly undermines the distinction between appearance and substance.
The orchestra becomes a laboratory of sonic behaviours. Conventional notes appear only intermittently, emerging from a dense network of friction sounds, breath noises, and unconventional articulations.
What makes the work compelling is its dramatic trajectory. The music is not merely experimental. It unfolds as a process of discovery in which hidden layers of sound gradually reveal themselves. The listener becomes increasingly aware of the physical mechanisms underlying instrumental performance.
3 Piano Concerto-Ausklang-1984-1985-47‘-YT/Neuburger-SWR SO-Roth
Marc’s Note:
One of Lachenmann’s greatest achievements, Ausklang reimagines the piano concerto tradition from within.
The piano is not treated as a heroic soloist opposed to the orchestra. Instead, soloist and ensemble participate in a vast exploration of resonance, attack, and decay. The title itself refers to lingering sound, to what remains after an event has occurred.
The work displays remarkable structural control. Moments of apparent fragility coexist with passages of immense power. Throughout the concerto, Lachenmann investigates the piano’s capacity to generate entire worlds of resonance.
Far from rejecting tradition, Ausklang engages directly with the concerto genre while transforming its underlying assumptions.
4 Mouvement for ensemble-1982-1984-25’-YT/EIC-Pintscher
Marc’s Note:
This ensemble work is one of the clearest demonstrations of Lachenmann’s ability to create musical motion from non-traditional materials.
Tiny gestures accumulate into larger processes. Fragments appear and disappear before they can stabilise. The subtitle (“before paralysis” or “before petrification”) suggests a state of perpetual becoming.
The work achieves extraordinary tension because it continually approaches stability without ever fully reaching it. Movement itself becomes the subject of the composition.
5 Notturno for cello and small orchestra-1989-24’-YT/Öhmann-WDR SO-Lin Liao
Marc’s Note:
One of Lachenmann’s most poetic works, Notturno reveals a more contemplative side of his musical personality.
The cello functions as both narrator and participant within a vast orchestral environment. Unlike the dramatic confrontations of many concertos, the relationship here is often introspective and reflective.
The work unfolds as a sequence of nocturnal visions. Sounds emerge from silence, linger briefly, and disappear again. The atmosphere is often mysterious, yet the underlying structure remains remarkably clear.
Notturno demonstrates how Lachenmann’s sonic innovations can serve deeply expressive ends.
6 SQ 3-Grido-2001-26’-YT/Quatuor Diotima
Marc’s Note:
Among the most accessible and immediately compelling of Lachenmann’s later works, Grido represents a culmination of his string quartet writing.
The title means “cry,” and the music indeed possesses an unusual emotional directness. Yet the cry is not expressed through traditional melody. It emerges through tension, pressure, and transformation of sound.
The quartet medium allows Lachenmann to achieve extraordinary refinement. Every gesture matters. Every sonic nuance contributes to a continuously evolving musical discourse.
Many listeners regard Grido as one of the masterpieces of contemporary quartet literature.
7 Allegro sostenuto for piano, clarinet and cello-1986-1988-30’-YT/Ensemble Recherche
Marc’s Note:
This remarkable trio demonstrates Lachenmann’s ability to generate large-scale structures from highly concentrated material.
The unusual instrumentation creates a constantly shifting balance between attack and resonance, between continuity and interruption.
The work combines intellectual rigor with exceptional vitality. Despite its complexity, the music never feels static. The interaction between the three performers produces a dynamic network of relationships that remains engaging throughout.
8 Opera-Das Mädchen mit den Schwefelhölzern-1990-1996-112‘-Spotify/SWR Vokalenensemble Stuttgart-SWR SO-Cambreling
Marc’s Note:
Lachenmann’s opera stands among the most important stage works of the late twentieth century.
Based loosely on Andersen’s fairy tale, the work transcends conventional narrative. The story becomes a meditation on suffering, exclusion, memory, and human dignity.
The score integrates virtually every aspect of Lachenmann’s musical language into a monumental theatrical synthesis. Instrumental sounds, voices, noise elements, and silence all contribute to the drama.
What makes the opera extraordinary is its emotional depth. Beneath the radical surface lies a profoundly human work that confronts themes of vulnerability and compassion with rare honesty.
15 Brian Ferneyhough-1943-England
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Piano
If Lachenmann transformed the nature of sound, Ferneyhough transformed the nature of musical thought.
Frequently associated with the New Complexity movement, Ferneyhough has often been reduced to a stereotype: impossibly difficult scores performed by virtuoso specialists. While the technical challenges are undeniable, this description misses the essence of his achievement.
Ferneyhough’s music is not complex for its own sake. Complexity is the consequence of a deeper artistic goal: the creation of musical situations that exceed simple comprehension. Multiple layers of activity coexist, interact, and evolve simultaneously. The listener is confronted not with a puzzle to solve but with a rich and unstable field of possibilities.
His works often resemble living organisms. Information proliferates, fragments collide, and structures continuously transform themselves. Yet beneath the surface density lies extraordinary compositional discipline.
Unlike many modernists who sought clarity through reduction, Ferneyhough embraces abundance. His music reflects the complexity of perception itself. Listening becomes an active process of exploration rather than passive reception.
Although frequently viewed as an intellectual composer, Ferneyhough’s finest works possess enormous expressive intensity. Their energy, volatility, and dramatic unpredictability create experiences that can be both exhilarating and deeply moving.
Few composers have expanded the possibilities of musical notation, performance, and structure as radically as Ferneyhough. His influence on subsequent generations remains immense.
1 La Terre est un Homme for large orchestra-1979-13’-Spotify/BBC SO-Brabbins
Marc’s Note:
One of Ferneyhough’s first major orchestral masterpieces, this work already displays many characteristics of his mature style.
The orchestra functions as a vast network of interacting processes. Events emerge simultaneously on multiple levels, creating an extraordinary sense of density and motion.
Despite its complexity, the music possesses remarkable expressive urgency. The title suggests elemental forces, and the score often conveys the impression of immense energies struggling for articulation.
2 Carceri d’Invenzione III for wind ensemble and percussions-1986-11’-YT/The Ensemble Contrechamps-Nieuw Ensemble-Hempel
Marc’s Note:
Part of the celebrated Carceri d’Invenzione cycle, this work is among Ferneyhough’s most dramatic achievements.
Inspired indirectly by Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, the music constructs a labyrinthine environment in which the violin navigates constantly shifting perspectives.
The soloist is neither hero nor victim but an explorer moving through a world of unstable relationships. Virtuosity becomes a means of revealing hidden structures rather than displaying technical prowess.
3 Plötzlichkeit for large orchestra-2006-23’-Spotify/BBC SO-Brabbins
Marc’s Note:
One of Ferneyhough’s strongest late orchestral works, Plötzlichkeit (“suddenness”) investigates abrupt transformation as a compositional principle.
Events emerge unexpectedly, altering the musical landscape without warning. The work demonstrates a greater transparency than many earlier scores while retaining the composer’s characteristic richness.
The result is music of exceptional dramatic tension, constantly balancing continuity and rupture.
4 Funérailles I for 7 strings and harp-1969-11’-Spotify/Arditti SQ-Ensemble Recherche-Vis
Marc’s Note:
An early masterpiece already revealing Ferneyhough’s distinctive voice.
The reduced instrumentation allows unusual clarity. Individual lines retain strong identities while participating in larger structural processes.
The work combines emotional intensity with rigorous organisation, foreshadowing many later developments.
5 Terrain for violin and wind octet-1992-14’-Spotify/Jennings-Elision Ensemble-Oliu
Marc’s Note:
One of Ferneyhough’s most compelling chamber works, Terrain explores relationships between the solo violin and a surrounding ensemble environment.
The title is revealing. The music behaves like a landscape traversed from multiple perspectives. The violin continuously negotiates shifting conditions, encountering resistance, support, and transformation.
The work balances extraordinary detail with a strong sense of large-scale direction.
6 SQ 6-2010-26’-YT/Arditti Qt
Marc’s Note:
A late masterpiece demonstrating how Ferneyhough’s language evolved toward greater transparency without sacrificing complexity.
The quartet medium allows the composer to concentrate his ideas with exceptional precision. Every gesture contributes to a densely interconnected musical fabric.
The work reveals a mature composer capable of balancing structural sophistication with remarkable expressive immediacy.
7 Unity Capsule for flute-1976-16’-YT/Cesari
Marc’s Note:
Perhaps the most famous solo flute work of the late twentieth century.
Ferneyhough pushes the instrument to its limits, creating a piece that demands extraordinary control and imagination from the performer.
Yet the work is more than a technical challenge. It constructs a complete musical universe in which every gesture carries structural significance. The flute becomes capable of astonishing expressive variety.
8 Lemma-Icon-Epigram-1981-11’-YT/Hodges
Marc’s Note:
Widely regarded as one of Ferneyhough’s supreme achievements.
The title suggests three stages of transformation, and the work unfolds as a continuous process of evolution. Materials are introduced, expanded, and reinterpreted across the composition.
The piano writing is among the most inventive in contemporary music. Virtuosity serves structural and expressive purposes simultaneously.
Lemma-Icon-Epigram represents Ferneyhough at the height of his powers: intellectually rigorous, technically dazzling, and artistically profound.
16 Georg Friedrich Haas-1953-Austria
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Opera
Among the major composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Georg Friedrich Haas occupies a singular position. While often associated with spectral music, his work ultimately transcends that label. Rather than treating sound as a vehicle for harmony, melody, or form, Haas approaches sound itself as a living phenomenon whose internal structure becomes the substance of the music. His compositions invite listeners into a world where pitch, timbre, resonance, and perception are inseparable.
At the heart of Haas’s language lies microtonality, particularly the use of just intonation. Yet unlike many composers who employ alternative tuning systems as a technical framework, Haas transforms microtonality into an expressive force. The tiny intervals between pitches create states of tension, instability, luminosity, and release that often feel almost physical. Sound seems to breathe, expand, contract, and shimmer. The listener is not simply hearing notes but experiencing the behaviour of sound itself.
One of Haas’s greatest achievements is his ability to unite rigorous construction with overwhelming emotional intensity. His music is meticulously organised, yet it rarely feels analytical. Beneath the sophisticated harmonic architecture lies a profound expressive world marked by longing, vulnerability, ecstasy, and darkness. Few contemporary composers have succeeded so completely in reconciling intellectual complexity with direct emotional impact.
Darkness itself has become one of Haas’s most distinctive compositional materials. In several works, performers play in complete darkness or under severely reduced lighting conditions. These are not theatrical effects but fundamental compositional decisions. By removing visual information, Haas encourages listeners to focus entirely on sound, allowing harmonic relationships and spatial phenomena to emerge with unusual clarity. Listening becomes an almost tactile experience.
Although connections can be drawn with Gérard Grisey and the French spectralists, Haas’s aesthetic trajectory is different. Where Grisey often explores the scientific and acoustic foundations of sound, Haas is more concerned with the psychological and emotional consequences of those acoustic realities. His music also shares affinities with Giacinto Scelsi’s fascination with the inner life of individual sounds and with Horatiu Rădulescu’s exploration of resonance and harmonic spectra. Yet Haas remains unmistakably himself: more dramatic than Scelsi, more structurally integrated than Rădulescu, and more emotionally exposed than most spectral composers.
A recurring feature of Haas’s oeuvre is the coexistence of opposites. Beauty emerges alongside violence. Clarity dissolves into ambiguity. Static harmonic fields coexist with powerful directional forces. Long spans of apparent stillness reveal intricate internal activity. This tension between motion and stasis gives many of his works their extraordinary sense of inevitability. The music appears suspended in time while simultaneously moving toward destinations that are often hidden from view.
Haas’s large-scale forms are particularly remarkable. Whether writing for orchestra, ensemble, chamber groups, or opera, he constructs musical architectures that unfold organically over long durations. Rather than relying on thematic development in the traditional sense, he shapes vast trajectories through evolving harmonic landscapes. Listeners often experience these works less as narratives than as journeys through changing states of perception.
His importance within contemporary music stems not only from his innovations in tuning and harmony but also from his redefinition of what listening itself can be. Haas asks us to hear differently: to attend to beating frequencies, resonance, shadow harmonies, and the subtle interactions between sounds. In doing so, he expands the very boundaries of musical experience.
Few living composers have created a sonic universe as immediately recognisable and as consistently compelling. Haas stands as one of the central figures of contemporary music, a composer who transformed the exploration of sound into an art of profound emotional and philosophical depth. His music reminds us that even within a single sustained tone there exist worlds still waiting to be discovered.
1 Limited Approximations for 6 tuned pianos and orchestra-2010-33’-YT/SWR SO-Cambreling
Marc’s Note:
This colossal concerto for six microtonally tuned pianos and orchestra is one of Haas’s defining masterpieces.
The pianos, each toned a twelfth of a tone apart, create a vast harmonic cloud in perpetual motion when combined. Six keyboards form an ultra-chromatical grid of 72 equal divisions of the octave.
The six pianos do not function as traditional soloists. Rather, they merge into a single gigantic hyper-instrument whose constantly shifting microtonal relationships generate beats, pulsations and acoustic shadows that seem to emerge from the sound itself.
The orchestra functions as a resonant field, amplifying and blurring the soloists’ microtonal vibrations.
The individual instrumental colours are often absorbed into the piano spectrum, making it difficult to distinguish where one sound source ends and another begins.
Haas acknowledges the acoustic impossibility of getting completely pure intervals within human-made tuning instruments. It is the equal temperament paradox which is a limited approximation of the infinite, continuous overtone spectrum.
In this piece, Haas does not adhere to a single dogma and mixes equal temperament, microtonal divisions and just intonation.
The piece is built as a massive macro-structure with specific harmonic tensions.
Over nearly 34 minutes, the listener inhabits a world of spectral shimmer that seems to breathe on its own.
The composer balances rigor and sensuality, transforming mathematical precision into luminous emotion and enveloping the audience in an overwhelming organic landscape of raw resonance.
2 Dark Dreams for orchestra-2013-33’-YT/Estonian Nat SO-Elts
Marc’s Note:
Here Haas engages more directly with the orchestra tradition. His trademark development of sound lasts about 17 minutes.
The music begins in shadow, whispered strings, tremulous beautiful winds, and gradually amasses energy in long dark waves.
The title suggests a nightmare, yet the work’s emotional spectrum is broader: it moves from fear to tenderness, from isolation to release.
Haas’s orchestration, always very refined, is a study in chiaroscuro, a Rembrandt of sound.
After seventeen minutes something very special happens: a clear melodic structure appears and the bassoon plays a solo melody. This linearity appears as an alien element but is soon transferred to the orchestra and we get a kind of Klangfarbenmelodie.
The appearance of melody is one of the most startling moments in Haas’s entire orchestral output. After nearly twenty minutes of harmonic turbulence and gradual transformation, linear musical thought suddenly emerges like a memory from another world.
Haas strives to let the listeners develop concrete associations when listening by reflecting on their lives, on difficult personal questions or suppressed thoughts. Those are the dark dreams.
In its closing measures faint harmonic glows replace dissonance, as if the dream had found its light.
The work demonstrates that Haas is not merely a composer of sound masses and microtonal processes. Beneath the complex surface lies an intensely lyrical imagination capable of producing moments of extreme vulnerability.
3 Ungefähr ganz genau for large orchestra-2022-29‘-YT/ ORF Radio SO Vienna-Alsop
Marc’s Note:
This compelling composition for large orchestra finds its conceptual inspiration in an 1885 international conference in Vienna, where the participants tried to determine a standard tuning pitch.
The composer explores the delicate friction between institutional tradition and personal sonic freedom.
He thus defends the cause of intentional imperfection which allows the musician to play subtly out of tune. The ultimate purpose is to increase the natural tension between divergent frequencies and to enrich the physical vibrations experienced by the listener.
Haas achieves acoustic unpredictability by alternating profound states of stillness with shattering blocks of sound. Striking glissandi create a highly saturated field of colour, while dynamic waves evoke raw physical sensations of convergence and divergence.
Throughout the work, pitches seem to drift in and out of focus. Chords never settle completely, creating a sense of instability that remains permanently alive. The listener is constantly suspended between certainty and ambiguity.
Approximate and exact are the philosophical paradox of the title and the composition captures the elusive spot where human error collides with mathematical precision.
The piece ultimately suggests that absolute precision may be less truthful than controlled imperfection. Human expressivity resides precisely in the space between the exact and the approximate. That idea lies at the heart of Haas’s philosophy.
4 In Vain for 24 instruments-2000-2002-56‘-YT/Argenta Chamber Ensemble-Galante
Marc’s Note:
As always with Haas, titles have meanings that deeply influence the musical piece and In Vain is an explicit commentary on history and human behaviour.
The success of the far-right party in the 1999 Austrian elections created a state of emotional despair for the composer and many of his compatriots.
He also felt that society and music slided backwards into familiar, rigid traps. There is a cyclical aspect of progress and failure that is conveyed by upward and downward spirals.
The work is also structured around a battle between the contrasting sonic worlds: equal temperament and just intonation.
These opposing tuning systems never fully reconcile. Their coexistence creates a permanent state of tension, mirroring the social and political conflicts that inspired the work.
The core concept however is light and darkness.
There is a connection between the visual lighting and the musical progression. Then, for about 20 minutes the hall is plunged into darkness, forcing the musicians to play extremely demanding scores from memory.
The absence of vision increases the listener’s acoustic awareness and makes the sound world more visceral.
In Vain radically transforms the listening experience and the role of the concert hall, from a site of passive listening into a space of shuddering mystery.
More than two decades after its composition, In Vain remains one of the defining statements of contemporary music: political engaged without becoming programmatic, technically revolutionary without sacrificing emotional power.
It is one of the most significant and hauntingly beautiful musical achievements of the 21 st century.
5 Ich suchte aber fand ihn nicht-2011-26‘-Spotify/Ensemble Phoenix Basel-Henneberger
Marc’s Note:
The title of the work refers to Chapter 3 of Solomon’s Song, where the speaker is searching through the city for the one her soul loves.
Historically, the verse has also been interpreted as a spiritual allegory for the union between man and the divine.
Haas tries to capture the experience of absence, yearning and the psychological terror of an unsuccessful search.
To achieve this goal, he uses an immersive sonic architecture with complex overtone series and microtonality.
The result is a fluid, but unstable acoustic environment.
Searching sonic textures mimic a blind journey through dark city streets or an unsettled mind at night.
Acoustic masses move between floating overtone structures and dark dissonances, which represent the cycle of hope and despair.
The ensemble often appears to wander through unstable harmonic territories, as if every attempted destination immediately dissolves into another path.
There are moments of intense beauty which dissolve suddenly, sonically representing the tragedy of searching for something which can’t be found.
The tension built by the composer fades away, the musical processes he introduced dissipate.
Like the Czech composer Alois Haba, one of the pioneers of microtonality, Haas lets forms appear like a stroll through forest and meadow.
These spontaneous and intuitive forms are bound to change progressively according to new perspectives.
The orchestration is fully in line with these principles as Haas organises the ensemble to achieve variation and colourfulness.
Unlike many sacred works that culminate in revelation, Haas deliberately withholds resolution. The search itself becomes the substance of the music, while fulfilment remains permanently beyond reach.
6 Weiter und weiter und weiter-2022-47‘-YT/Ensemble Modern-Kaziboni
Marc’s Note:
The title captures Haas’s obsessive sense of continuity and he builds it entirely around an unbroken cascading structural acceleration.
While writing the piece, Haas was working on his memoirs during a period of profound reflection.
The work feels like a meditation on persistence, both artistic and human.
Every structural cycle lasts a few minutes and the composition reaches a peak tempo at one stage.
Metric modulations drop the tempo back down, only to see it accelerate all over again.
Besides his trademark microtonality, Haas also features an acoustic drone, consisting of two pianos equipped with electronic bows which keep vibrating without human interaction and produce an acoustic resonance that underlines the shifting tempos.
The continuous drone functions as a sonic horizon against which all temporal activity unfolds. While tempos accelerate and contract, this underlying resonance remains remarkably stable, creating the impression of motion occurring within a large state of permanence.
There is no real climax, only the deepening of awareness: an art that does not seek catharsis but transformation through endurance.
The relentless pacing reflects a kind of psychological agony and results in a transformative listening experience that pushes both performers and audiences to their limits.
The listener gradually loses any conventional sense of musical destination. What remains is a heightened awareness of time itself and of the subtle psychological changes produced by prolonged listening.
7 SQ 8-2014-21’-YT/Jack Qt
Marc’s Note:
Haas has written one of the most important and innovative string quartet cycles of the 21st century. He has already published eleven string quartets.
After some monumental masterpieces like the third quartet performed in total darkness, Haas has consistently added new elements to the following quartets.
Whereas earlier quartets often focused on darkness, spatial perception or extreme duration, the SQ 8 places tuning itself at the centre of the musical discourse. The quartet becomes a laboratory in which harmonic relationships are continuously tested, destabilized and rediscovered.
Haas is obsessed with the physical properties of sound, acoustics and unconventional instrument tunings.
The latter is precisely the element that stands out in the eighth quartet with its radical use of scordatura.
Sixteen strings are tuned to entirely different pitches and thus decoupled from standard equal temperament to generate unstable, irregular microtonal scales.
The opening microtonal intervals and sliding pitches create a very dissonant start, but as the piece unfolds the web of overtones slowly align to achieve moments of pure just intonation.
Pure chords, thus generated, are in contrast to the surrounding unstable textures.
Balancing the microtonal demands against a delicate but dynamic spectrum is the challenge that only the best quartets will attempt to achieve.
The result is not merely an exploration of alternative tuning systems but a profound reimagining of what a string quartet can be in the twenty-first century.
8 Opera-Bluthaus-2010-2011-102‘-YT/Wegener-Hartmann-Katzameier-Gloger- SWR Radio SO Stuttgart-Blunier
Marc’s Note:
Bluthaus marks the beginning of Haas’s long collaboration with librettist Händl Klaus and stands among the most psychologically penetrating operas of the early twenty-first century. Premiered in 2011, the work centres on Nadja, a young woman attempting to escape the devastating legacy of abuse and trauma associated with her family home. The opera unfolds less as an external drama than as an exploration of memory, guilt and psychological fragmentation.
What makes Bluthaus remarkable is the restraint with which it handles extraordinarily difficult subject matter. The opera concerns incest and its aftermath, yet Haas and Klaus avoid sensationalism. Instead of depicting events directly, they focus on the lingering psychological consequences. The real drama occurs within Nadja’s consciousness. Past and present become inseparable, memories intrude upon reality, and the house itself acquires an almost symbolic presence as a repository of suffering.
Musically, Haas creates an atmosphere of almost unbearable tension. His microtonal language proves ideally suited to the opera’s emotional landscape. Slight deviations in pitch generate a feeling of instability that mirrors Nadja’s fractured inner world. Harmonies often seem suspended between attraction and resistance, producing a continuous sense of unease. The listener feels that the music is searching for resolution while simultaneously denying it.
One of the opera’s greatest achievements is the way orchestral sound becomes psychological space. Rather than accompanying the action, the orchestra exposes hidden emotional states. Dense harmonic clouds, spectral resonances and fragile instrumental textures function almost as extensions of Nadja’s subconscious. The boundary between external reality and inner experience gradually dissolves.
The vocal writing is equally remarkable. Haas avoids conventional operatic display in favour of heightened speech and highly expressive vocal contours. The singers become carriers of psychological truth rather than theatrical archetypes. Every phrase seems shaped by emotional necessity. The result is a drama of extraordinary intimacy, despite the large forces involved.
Viewed within Haas’s oeuvre, Bluthaus demonstrates that his exploration of sound is never purely technical. The same sensitivity to microtonal relationships that animates his instrumental music becomes, in the operatic context, a powerful vehicle for human expression. The opera transforms subtle acoustic phenomena into emotional meaning. Trauma, memory and longing for liberation are not merely represented; they are embodied in the sound itself.
Bluthaus remains one of Haas’s most moving achievements because it unites his sophisticated harmonic imagination with a profoundly humane understanding of psychological suffering. The result is an opera that is both musically innovative and emotionally devastating.
17 Tristan Murail-1948-France
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Ensemble, Chamber, Piano
Tristan Murail stands among the most influential composers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, not simply as a pioneer of spectral music but as one of the great re-imaginers of orchestral sound. His achievement lies in transforming the very notion of musical material. Where earlier generations organised music primarily through melody, harmony or serial structures, Murail begins with sound itself: its internal life, its resonance, its hidden colours and its capacity for continuous transformation.
Drawing inspiration from acoustics, psychoacoustics, natural phenomena and later computer-assisted analysis, Murail developed a musical language in which timbre becomes a structural force. Harmonic spectra, instrumental resonances and complex sound morphologies generate forms that seem to grow organically rather than being imposed from outside. His music often unfolds as a living process in which one sonority gradually evolves into another, creating the impression of constant becoming.
Yet Murail’s art is far more than the application of scientific principles. Beneath the acoustic research lies a profoundly poetic imagination. Seas, clouds, dreams, light, distant landscapes and symbolic images recur throughout his oeuvre. Scientific investigation and sensory wonder remain inseparable. The composer studies sound with the precision of a researcher while shaping it with the intuition of a painter.
A central characteristic of Murail’s music is its reconciliation of opposites. Instrumental and electronic sound intermingle. Structure and sensuality coexist. Complexity is balanced by immediacy. His works often achieve a rare state in which highly sophisticated compositional processes remain perceptible as vivid and tangible experiences. The listener may not understand the underlying techniques, yet instinctively perceives the logic of transformation.
Over the decades Murail’s language evolved from the fluid continuities of his early spectral works toward increasingly fragmented, unpredictable and multidimensional forms. Nevertheless, a constant remains: the conviction that music should reveal hidden aspects of perception and allow listeners to hear the world anew.
In Murail’s finest works, sound ceases to be merely a vehicle for musical ideas and becomes a phenomenon worthy of contemplation in itself. Few composers have expanded our understanding of orchestral colour, resonance and sonic metamorphosis so profoundly. His music invites us to inhabit sound from within, transforming listening into an act of discovery.
1 Le Partage des Eaux for orchestra-1995-22’-Spotify/BBC SO-Valade
Marc’s Note:
In Le Partage des Eaux, Murail started to study very complex sounds: noisy sounds, natural sounds. The sounds that are analysed originate from natural phenomena: a wave breaking softly on the shore or a backwash effect. They are transformed, dilated or compressed and contain strangely coloured, alien, yet entirely organic harmonies. Other musical structures of the work, coming from the metaphorical or more abstract perspective often create powerful orchestral movements. Although timbre was a major concern for the composer it is probably more correct to talk about a sonic synthesis, a new orchestral sound. Synthetic sounds are mixed with the instruments, initially by a synthesizer and later by a computer.These sounds supplement the orchestra and clarify, enrich or smoothen the score.They are fully integrated in the orchestration and are perhaps the first steps toward a computer-assisted orchestra. Thus, the orchestra acts like a giant acoustic synthesizer and the instruments fuse into composite sound masses that shift from glass-like transparencies to dense, violent crests. The composer feels that the work can be heard in different ways:
-the metaphorical with the analysis of aquatic movements
-the geographical with the line that parts the waters
-the psychological with life’s ruptures
2 Piano Concerto-Le Désenchantement du Monde-2012-31’-YT/Aimard-BRSO-Benjamin
Marc’s Note:
The title refers to the writings of the brilliant German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920), who considered the dawning of a clearly more scientific era as the access to a world without magic. That would undermine the feeling of freedom and human responsibility. Le Désenchantement du Monde unfolds as both lament and liberation.
The concerto constantly blurs the traditional opposition between soloist and orchestra.
The piano, initially brilliant and assertive gradually dissolves into the orchestral fabric, a metaphor for the fading of the human voice in a mechanised universe. Yet Murail’s music resists despair: its harmonics shimmer with fragile radiance, as if disenchantment could give way to new wonder. The piano’s resonance merges with spectral textures of winds and strings, forming irridescent fields that hover between tonality and noise. In this interlacing of rationality and imagination it is no doubt the artistic fantasy that has the last word. After a kind of thunderous false finale, the work concludes in an unexpected calm. This is music of dissolution as renewal, a meditation on the vanishing of illusion and the rediscovery of light.
3 Serendib for ensemble-1992-17’-YT/EIC-Robertson
Marc’s Note:
Serendib named after the ancient Persian and Arabic word for Sri Lanka, is a sonic topography, a voyage through imagined geographies and unexpected discoveries. The title alludes to the notion of serendipity, the finding of something valuable that was not being actively sought, and this principle lies at the heart of the work’s musical design.
A watershed moment in Murail’s evolution, Serendib marks a departure from the fluid continuities of his earlier spectral works toward fractured processes, abrupt transitions and a deliberate cultivation of surprise. Yet these discontinuities never feel arbitrary. They emerge from the internal transformation of the material itself, creating a music that is constantly unpredictable while retaining a profound organic coherence.
The entire structure is generated from five elemental wave forms of differing durations. Through processes of dilation, compression and recombination, these basic components generate the musical discourse in its entirety. The listener is thus carried through a succession of sonic landscapes whose contours seem simultaneously inevitable and unforeseen.
Its sonorous universe is among the most richly coloured conceived by the composer. Brilliant halos of bell sounds, bird-like figurations and intricate wind textures in the highest registers create an atmosphere of luminous instability. Two synthesizers are integrated into the orchestra, extending its palette with shimmering harp-like resonances and metallic sonorities that blend seamlessly with the instrumental writing.
The work’s exoticism does not arise from imitation of distant cultures but from the continual transformation of sound itself. Harmonic spectra shift like changing tropical light, instrumental colours appear and disappear like mirages, and musical objects emerge unexpectedly before dissolving into new configurations. What the listener perceives as accidental discovery is in fact the result of an extraordinarily precise compositional process.
In Serendib Murail achieves a rare synthesis of sensual immediacy and structural rigour. The music unfolds like an exploration of an unknown territory where every turn reveals a new perspective, yet where all paths remain mysteriously connected.
4 La Barque Mystique for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano-1993-12’-YT/Jullion-Comte-Siot-Lauridon-Cottet-Bourgogne
Marc’s Note:
The mystical boat is in fact a reference to the French painter Odilon Redon’s several pastels on the subject. Complexity and evidence of coloured relations mix well, despite the ” a priori” incompatible hues. Rhythms of forms, where blurred beaches and foggy colours contrast with incisive lines and vividly coloured flat washes, find their equivalent in the architecture and the harmonic palette of Murail’s music. It is one of the composer’s most poetic creations scored for ensemble as it floats between stillness and motion, sound and silence. The title evokes a vessel suspended on luminous waters, an apt image for Murail’s harmonic world, where resonance guides form. Each gesture emerges from the previous one, like a wave from a wave: continuity without repetition. The timbres are translucent, the rhythms breath-like, the piece seems to hover outside time, a meditation on the act of listening itself. In La Barque mystique, Murail attains a rare equilibrium between spirituality and science, physics as a prayer.
5 L’Esprit des Dunes for ensemble-1994-16’-YT/EIC-Ward
Marc’s Note:
Each of the micro-vibrations in a note produces its own distinct frequency, known as a partial. These partials play an essential role in spectral music and in this piece, Murail was able to follow the evolution of a sound through the technique known as the monitoring of partials. This technique allowed him to generate electronic sounds as a new type with unusual sonorities that possess a life characteristic of acoustical sounds. The act of composition was thus able to intervene in the heart of the sound. Two sonorous objects were starting points for the piece. Extracts of Mongol and Tibetan music and granulous sounds (like friction, rain sticks, Brazilian percussion instruments like maracas). Thanks to micro-surgical sound techniques, these sonorous objects of diverse origins interpenetrate and create continuity in the music. Murail extends his spectral palette to the cultural and geographical and integrates field recordings and instrumental imitations into a vast harmonic continuum. Voices of winds, bells and overtone singing dissolve into orchestral resonance, rather than exoticizing. Murail absorbs these materials into his own syntax: timbre as a memory of landscape. The result is hauntingly organic: a music of migration and transformation. The dunes of the title are metaphors for Murail’s art itself: forms shaped by invisible forces, continually shifting, never still.
6 Un Sogno for ensemble-2014-20’-YT/Radio France PO-Diakun
Marc’s Note:
Un Sogno is a seminal composition, that serves as a unique aesthetic dialogue across generations, bridging Murail’s advanced computer-assisted spectral analysis with the raw, archival tape recordings of the Italian visionary master Giacinto Scelsi. Murail used computer musical techniques to analyze the sound spectrum of Scelsi’s piece and his composition is an organic expansion of the frequencies he found. True to Murail’s style, the form avoids fragmented short movements. Instead Un Sogno flows like an uninterrupted, dreamlike trajectory. By merging historical analog synthesis with 21st century tools, Murail validates Scelsi’s early work while delivering a dazzling masterclass in contemporary spectral music.
7 Territoires de l’Oubli for piano-1977-29’-Spotify/Nonken
Marc’s Note:
This work is a massive exploration of the piano’s resonance unfolding in a huge curve of continuously evolving textures. The piece is not divided into traditional movements: It moves through continuous, organic transformations. A psychological landscape is suggested in the title: wandering through vast, untamed territories of memory, where musical materials emerge, dissolve and are forgotten. Murail pushes the envelope and treats the the piano like an electronic synthesizer. His revolutionary piano techniques include:
-a depressed right pedal
-rapid finger control
-rhythmic waves
By making harmony become inseparable from resonance, Murail focuses entirely on the physical behaviour of sound, waves, overtones and resonance. The harmonic language is generated by overtone relationships instead of traditional chord progression.
Territoires de l’Oubli is a demanding and perceptually transformative work that radically redefined how composers and audiences listen to the instrument.
8 Les Travaux et les Jours for piano-2002-39’-Spotify/Nonken
Marc’s Note:
The piece was composed over a large period of time as suggested by the title which was borrowed from Hesiod, the ancient Greek poet. Its large-scale form unfolds through slowly evolving harmonic fields, each sonority growing out of the resonance left by the previous one. The title suggests the rhythms of human activity described by Hesiod: work, waiting, cultivation and renewal. Murail translates these ideas into musical time. Rather than progressing through dramatic contrasts, the music advances through gradual transformations whose significance becomes apparent only over long spans.
The piano is treated as a resonant organism. Harmonic spectra emerge, overlap and decay, creating an intricate network of relationships between sound and silence. What appears simple on the surface reveals an extraordinary richness of internal detail. Unlike the dreamlike fluidity of Un Sogno or the exploratory character of Territoires de l’Oubli, Travaux et les Jours possesses a quiet wisdom and sense of balance. The music seems less concerned with discovery than with contemplation, less with movement than with the patient observation of change itself. In this late masterpiece, Murail demonstrates that the spectral imagination can illuminate not only the hidden life of sound but also the experience of time. The result is a work of rare depth and serenity, where every resonance becomes a measure of passing life.
18 Morton Feldman-1926-1987-Orchestral, Chamber, Piano, Vocal
Primary Forces: Orchestral, Chamber, Piano, Vocal
Morton Feldman transformed one of the most fundamental assumptions of Western music: that composition is a process unfolding through development and direction. Instead, he created works that inhabit time rather than travel through it. Influenced by painting, particularly the abstract canvases of the New York School, Feldman conceived music as a field of relationships in which sounds coexist rather than compete. His mature works abandon traditional narrative and replace it with an art of attention, memory, and subtle variation.
What appears at first to be simplicity gradually reveals extraordinary complexity. Feldman’s music operates through minute changes in rhythm, register, duration, and timbre. Repetition is never literal, and variation is rarely obvious. The listener is invited into a state where certainty gives way to perception itself. Sounds emerge, resonate, and vanish like fragile objects illuminated for a brief moment before returning to silence.
The great achievement of Feldman’s late works is their redefinition of musical time. Duration becomes structure, memory becomes form, and listening becomes an active exploration of the limits of consciousness. Few composers have so profoundly altered our understanding of what music can be. The works presented here are among Feldman’s finest achievements; each represents a fundamental discovery. Together they reveal how he gradually transformed our understanding of musical time, instrumental colour, repetition, resonance and listening itself. Read in sequence, they chart one of the most original artistic journeys of the late twentieth century, each work opening a new territory in Feldman’s ever-expanding musical universe.
• Piano Concerto: listening inside resonance.
• Violin Concerto: listening beyond virtuosity.
• Coptic Light: listening inside orchestral colour.
• String Quartet No 2: listening beyond memory.
• For Philip Guston: listening beyond psychological time.
• Piano and String Quartet: listening to fragile relationships.
• Palais de Mari: listening to microscopic difference. • Rothko Chapel: listening to silence itself
1 Piano and orchestra-1975-19’-Spotify/Hinterhäuser-Frankfurt SO-Tamayo
Marc’s Note:
Although called Piano and Orchestra this is not a concerto in any traditional sense. The piano never seeks to dominate or challenge the orchestra. Instead, it inhabits the same fragile acoustic space, becoming one colour among many.
Feldman described the piece as a still life and the comparison is revealing. Like a painter arranging a few ordinary objects on a table, he presents isolated sonorities whose significance lies not in narrative development but in their subtle relationships. Each sound appears almost detached from what came before, allowing the listener to experience it with extraordinary clarity.
The orchestra functions less as an accompanying body than as an extension of the piano’s resonance. Tiny instrumental groups emerge and disappear, while silence becomes as important as the notes themselves. Harmonic events seem suspended outside conventional musical time, creating an atmosphere in which every attack, every decay and every register acquires equal importance.
The work also reveals Feldman’s fascination with touch. The piano writing is never overtly virtuosic but depends on the most delicate control of weight, attack and resonance. Sound is treated almost as a physical substance whose texture changes according to the slightest variation in touch. The listener gradually becomes aware not of melodies or harmonic progressions, but of the living qualities of individual sounds themselves.
In this remarkable work, Feldman transforms the concerto into an exercise in listening. Rather than following a musical argument, we contemplate a succession of sonic objects whose quiet presence continually renews our perception of time. It is one of the clearest demonstrations that an orchestra can become a vast resonating space rather than a vehicle for dramatic expression.
2 Violin and orchestra-1979-51‘-YT/Widmann-Frankfurt Radio SO-Pomarico
Marc’s Note:
Violin and Orchestra extends Feldman’s still-life concept onto a much larger canvas. Lasting nearly an hour, it marks the beginning of the immense late works in which musical time itself becomes the principal subject.
Once again, the solo instrument is not a heroic protagonist. The violin neither competes with nor rises above the orchestra. Instead, it drifts through an ever-changing landscape of delicate instrumental colours, entering and leaving the surrounding texture almost imperceptibly.
Despite the large orchestral forces, Feldman rarely employs them collectively. Instruments appear in constantly shifting combinations, producing an astonishing transparency in which every sound retains its individual identity. The orchestra behaves less like a mass than like an immense collection of finely balanced timbres whose interactions continually alter the listener’s perception of space.
The music unfolds through minute transformations rather than thematic development. Similar gestures return with tiny variations of register, duration or instrumentation, creating the impression that one is observing the same object under continually changing light. Nothing seems to happen in the conventional sense, yet everything is constantly changing. The listener gradually abandons expectations of destination and becomes immersed in the continuous present of the music.
What makes Violin and Orchestra one of Feldman’s supreme achievements is its redefinition of musical time. Duration is no longer a framework through which events pass, but a medium that allows sounds to reveal their full existence. The work invites an exceptionally concentrated form of listening, where memory, expectation and immediate perception become delicately balanced. In doing so, Feldman transforms the orchestra into a vast acoustic environment in which every sound is allowed simply to be.
3 Coptic Light for orchestra-1985-21’-YT/RCO-Eötvös
Marc’s Note:
Coptic Light is Feldman’s last orchestral piece and is perhaps the culmination of his attempt to make an orchestra sound like a single breathing organism rather than a collection of instrumental sections.
Influenced by ancient Coptic textiles, seen at the Louvre, Feldman was intent on conveying an essential atmosphere of another realm.
He was in fact interested to question what elements of Western music could likewise transpose the instrumental imagery of his own culture into the future.
Prompted by Sibelius’s remark that an orchestra has no pedal, like a piano, he set out to create an orchestral pedal, continually varying in nuance.
Rather than sustaining a single note mechanically, Feldman creates an orchestral pedal through constantly shifting instrumental combinations. The harmony appears motionless, while its internal colour is in perpetual transformation.
The extremely soft dynamics generate a remarkable chiaroscuro of sound.
Instrumental colours overlap and dissolve into one another, creating a continuously glowing orchestral mass whose internal details are constantly changing.
Rhythmic and pitch motifs are pervasively repeated but are almost never identical.
There is a combination of stasis and motion as the stable harmonic foundation is kept alive by tiny, microscopic ripples of sound.
The listener no longer observes the music from the outside but inhabits the sound itself, experiencing time as an almost physical dimension.
Feldman took great pains to keep his scores from sounding man-made.
Traditional themes, climaxes and formal development disappear in favour of an astonishing exploration of timbre, resonance and acoustic perception.
4 SQ 2-1983-332’-YT/Flux Quartet
Marc’s Note:
Feldman’s Second String Quartet is one of the longest works in the entire classical repertoire, lasting around five to six hours. Yet its vast duration is not conceived as a feat of endurance or a monumental statement. Rather, Feldman uses extreme length as a compositional tool, creating a listening situation in which memory gradually loses its grip and the distinctions between repetition and variation become increasingly blurred.
The music unfolds through countless small gestures: brief melodic fragments, delicate chords, and recurring patterns that seem familiar yet never return in exactly the same form. Instead of progressing toward a goal, the quartet drifts through a continuously changing landscape where every event appears both new and remembered. Feldman often spoke of the influence of oriental carpets, whose intricate patterns reveal subtle differences within apparent repetition. The quartet functions in a similar manner. Tiny alterations in rhythm, register, articulation, or harmony become the true substance of the work.
As the hours pass, ordinary perceptions of musical time begin to dissolve. The listener is no longer concerned with where the music is heading but with the experience of inhabiting its present moment. Silence, resonance, and decay become as important as the notes themselves. The quartet thus creates a unique psychological space in which concentration alternates with daydreaming, attention with forgetfulness.
Far from being static, the work is in constant motion at a microscopic level. Its achievement lies in transforming duration into form and memory into musical material. The String Quartet No. 2 stands as one of Feldman’s supreme masterpieces and perhaps the most radical exploration of musical time ever undertaken by a composer.
5 For Philip Guston for flutes, percussion, piano and celesta-1984-55’ (excerpt)-YT/Chase-Schick-Rothenberg
Marc’s Note:
For Philip Guston is one of Feldman’s long duration pieces for ensemble and features instruments like a vibraphone, chimes and celesta to contrast with traditional instruments.
His connection with visual artists, particularly abstract expressionists, was very strong.
Guston was a close friend with whom he frequently discussed how the fluidity of paint could translate into the transience of sound.
When Guston introduced raw representational elements in his paintings, they had a painful falling out.
The posthumous tribute to Guston must therefore be seen as a kind of reconciliation and a massive monument to their shared history.
The immense scale of the piece is used by Feldman to alter the listener’s perception of time.
The delicate instrumentation allows the music to be played extremely quietly and to create a fragile, but luminous and dreamlike sound world.
What we deal with is a vast, continuous landscape of sound with the aim of achieving a state of contemplation.
Musical phrases are repeated but always slightly altered, mirroring slight variations found in handmade rugs or nearly identical brushstrokes.
Due to the length of the piece, memory fades and the boundaries between silence and sound blur.
The listener gradually loses the ability to distinguish between what has just been heard and what is being heard now. Memory itself becomes one of the compositional materials
The result is one of the twentieth century’s greatest meditations on friendship, memory and loss, but also on the mysterious way human consciousness reconstructs the past through fragments that are never quite the same.
6 Piano and string quartet-1985-85’-YT/Ensemble New Babylon
Marc’s note:
Composed during the final years of Feldman’s life, Piano and String Quartet represents one of the most refined and intimate statements of his late style. Lasting approximately eighty minutes, the work inhabits a world of extraordinary fragility in which sound appears almost weightless.
The piano and string quartet do not engage in dialogue in the traditional chamber-music sense. Instead, they coexist within a shared acoustic space, exchanging isolated gestures, soft chords, and fleeting melodic traces. Feldman avoids thematic development and dramatic interaction. Rather, he allows sounds to emerge, linger, and disappear with the inevitability of natural phenomena.
The piece is built from delicate patterns that continuously shift beneath the surface. Chords return in altered forms, rhythms subtly change their proportions, and instrumental colours merge and separate with remarkable precision. As in much of Feldman’s late music, the listener is drawn into a state where memory becomes uncertain. One constantly feels that something has been heard before, yet exact recognition remains elusive.
Particularly striking is Feldman’s treatment of resonance. The piano’s decaying sonorities blend with the sustained tones of the strings, creating an ever-changing halo of sound. Harmony is not used to generate tension and release but as a field of colour whose shades evolve almost imperceptibly. The music seems suspended between movement and stillness, between presence and disappearance.
The work possesses a quiet elegiac quality that many commentators have associated with Feldman’s awareness of mortality during his final years. Yet there is no overt expression of grief. Instead, the music projects an atmosphere of extraordinary calm, contemplation, and acceptance. Every sound appears precious because it is fleeting.
Piano and String Quartet is one of Feldman’s most beautiful late compositions: a work of immense concentration and subtlety that distills his lifelong fascination with memory, pattern, resonance, and the mystery of musical time into a single, luminous statement.
7 Palais de Mari for piano-1986-27’-YT/Inoue
Marc’s Note:
Feldman’s final solo piano composition is dedicated to his friend, the Italian painter Francesco Clemente.
Palais de Mari combines the characteristic ambiguity and suspended time of his late style with an unusual transparency and lyricism.
It is not as massive as his earlier piano masterpiece “Triadic Memories”, Instead it is a mesmerising twenty-five-minute tapestry of gently resonant harmonies whose consonance is continually coloured by subtle ambiguity.
Feldman was impressed by a photography of the ancient Mesopotamian Palace at the Louvre Museum and felt a profound sense of magic and deep time, an aura he tried to translate into sound.
A delicate four-note figure opens the work. It never functions as a conventional theme but returns throughout the piece like a distant memory, continually transformed.
This motif and other chordal entities are repeated throughout the piece with slight variations in rhythm, order and register.
The sound hovers in a liminal space between consonance and dissonance.
The piece possesses a timeless dimension where ideas appear, fade and return.
Although certain sound constellations recur some minute changes force the listener to learn to recognize even the smallest shift as an important occurrence.
Feldman trains our aesthetical perception within the smallest imaginable range of change. His ultimate goal was to offer the possibility of a world that would totally differ from the frantic, noisy excesses of modern life.
8 Rothko Chapel for soprano, alto, viola, celesta, percussion and choir-1971-25’-YT/Schappé-Czinczel-Darzins-Stange-Maier-swr Vokalensemble-Creed
Marc’s Note:
In the sixties, Feldman started to write works that used long tones and wordless singing. They were played very quietly, bringing out sounds, harmonic content and other elements that could not be otherwise heard.
He created surfaces with a minimum of contrast and Rothko’s Chapel fits this pattern and is designed as a meditative work to be heard by the listener surrounded by the sounds of the chapel itself.
The piece is a perfect acoustic mirror to Rothko’s monumental, monochromatic dark 14 abstract paintings exhibited in the octagonal chapel in Houston.
Feldman’s music requests a slow attentive focus, just like the paintings demand that the viewer sits still to perceive the minute shifts in the massive colour fields.
He achieves this by using a mixed choir that sings long unchanging chords, by avoiding any rhythmic pulse, by suspending time echoing the timeless, spiritual void of the chapel.
The work unfolds as a succession of quietly evolving sound fields. A solitary viola introduces the meditative atmosphere, after which the mixed chorus enters with sustained wordless harmonies of extraordinary purity. Chimes, vibraphone and restrained percussion articulate the musical space without imposing a conventional pulse, while the soprano emerges only briefly like a distant human presence.
Near the conclusion, the viola recalls a haunting quasi-Hebraic melody that Feldman had apparently composed as a teenager. It introduces a sudden current of personal memory into the otherwise anonymous musical landscape, transforming the work into both an elegy for friendship and a meditation on remembrance itself.
Economy of means and deep emotional depth characterize this masterpiece. Few works unite architecture, painting and music so completely into a single contemplative experience.
Rothko Chapel stands among the supreme spiritual compositions of the twentieth century, inviting listeners of every belief, or none, to inhabit silence as a place of shared human reflection.
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