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.
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.
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