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Making utopias come true: composer Michael Wertmüller

Michael Wertmüller, a portrait by Gabrielle Weber

Michael Wertmüller’s music sounds anarchic, virtuosic and highly energetic. From the shortest compositions to immersive, expansive music theatre, his works combine approaches from jazz and contemporary music, always dramatic, intense and full on. A portrait by Gabrielle Weber

 

Porträt Michael Wertmüller zVg. Michael Wertmüller

 

Gabrielle Weber
“I just love craziness and playing crazy. I like virtuosity,” says Michael Wertmüller in an interview. The extreme is his norm. His radical, genre-breaking works are highly complex and usually interweave meticulously notated contemporary music with jazz, pop, rock and improvisation.

 

The drummer and the composer

As drummer, Wertmüller initially played in various fusion bands. From then on, the path to composing was natural as the music he wanted to play had to be invented first and so he gradually began to compose pieces for his bands himself: “It was a mix of jazz, rock, death metal and hardcore. From today’s perspective, it was a wild mess that wanted to and had to be tamed,” says Wertmüller.

His drumming performances as well as his first compositions are concentrated, highly concentrated power. In “check_in_swiss”, Wertmüller improvises a three-minute solo in consistently high intensity during a sound check for the band Full Blast.

 


Michael Wertmüller, percussion solo check-in-swiss, 2001.

 

As a percussionist, for the Bern Symphony Orchestra first and later for Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra, Wertmüller was fascinated by the intensity, power and drama of the classical orchestral apparatus. “It was a huge pleasure to follow how the instruments communicate with each other in the midst of this orchestral apparatus, how this web of compositions is connected. I was really interested in that.” From 1995 onwards, Wertmüller focused entirely on classical composition by studying composition with Dieter Schnebel at Berlin’s Hochschule der Künste.

 

Michael Wertmüller the percussionist © Francesca Pfeffer

 

Bringing opposites together

Meanwhile, he continued to tour the world with bands, for example with eminent jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and bassist Marino Pliakas in the trio Full Blast, until Brötzmann’s death in June 2023. “Being on the road, playing in a jazz context, has always been an incredibly important influence and at the same time, composition or, in a broader sense, classical music is also a strong influence in my playing.”

 

Peter Brötzmann is regarded as a radical jazz innovator thanks to his energetic playing and, along with Dieter Schnebel, was a formative personality for Wertmüller’s composing. “I had known Brötzmann since I was 22 years old, even before I studied with Schnebel. He kind of pulled me along and took me with him.”

 


Michael Wertmüller, antagonisme contrôlé, World-premiere concert  6.4.2014,  WDR-Funkhaus Köln. Peter Brötzmann (Saxophon), Marino Pliakas (E-Bass), Dirk Rothbrust (Schlagzeug), Ensemble Musikfabrik, conductor Christian Eggen.

 

“The free form of jazz and the very strict serial music: that’s a huge balancing act and they influence each other strongly.” Wertmüller’s “classical” composing brings both musical genres together. Wertmüller composed three works for Peter Brötzmann as a soloist, in which he incorporated Brötzmann’s improvisations into composed scores for new music ensembles. “Brötzmann never did that before. For me, it was an honour and showed that he respected and valued the connection between the two”.

In antagonisme contrôlé for three soloists, Brötzmann, Pliakas and percussion solo, and the Ensemble Musikfabrik, Wertmüller uses improvised solos by Brötzmann and Pliakas as a counterpoint to the strictly notated movement of the 19-piece Ensemble Musikfabrik from Cologne. His aim is to bring the free spirit of jazz and serial classical composition, two opposite worlds together in one form, so that both retain their character.

 

Connecting different soundscapes

 

Wertmüller’s band Steamboat Switzerland brings together contrasting soundscapes: since its foundation in 1995, the trio, consisting of Marino Pliakas, electric bass, Lucas Niggli, percussion, and Dominik Blum, Hammond organ, has combined jazz, rock, metal and improvisation with contemporary music.

Since their first encounters in the 1990s, Michael Wertmüller has become something of a resident composer for the band. “Steamboat is the most radical band that can play sheet music that I know of. So I can compose like a madman and it’s played like that: with an incredible radicalism, which is of course fantastic for me,” says Wertmüller about what he considers his favourite band.

Wertmüller later incorporated the trio into many of his major music projects, often in conjunction with classical ensembles.

“Steamboat is actually an incredible engine, a generator. The precision with which they play the material could definitely inspire a classical orchestra,” says Wertmüller.


Michael Wertmüller, discorde for Hammond-Orgel, E-Bass, Drum Set und Ensemble, Uraufführung Donaueschinger Musiktage 15.10.2016, Steamboat Switzerland, Klangforum Wien, conductor Titus Engel.

 

In discorde, premiered at the Donaueschinger Musiktage 2016, the trio plays with Klangforum Wien, conducted by Titus Engel. Wertmüller stages an actual battle between the different musical genres. However, he is not interested in the contrast, but rather in what they have in common: “They were the engine in the whole structure. It was a train travelling in the same direction.”

 

Modern dramas – utopias

 

“I don’t claim to unite styles. I rather have the feeling that they have become completely intertwined over the course of my life. Actually, it’s also a dramatic thing when it blends like that. To me, it’s a modern drama.”.

Wertmüller has been implementing the dramatic blending of opposites in five international music theatre productions since 2013, so far most consistently in the experimental opera D.I.E for the Ruhrtriennale 2021, where the stage and the space are also integrated. In a disused industrial hall, Landschaftspark Duisburg Nord’s power station, the audience is placed in the centre, surrounded by an all-round catwalk that serves as a stage for Steamboat, a string quartet, a punk band, a rapper, a conferencière and classical singers. Animated holographic music visualisations and enlarged sketches by visual artist Albert Oehlen envelop the whole. Michael Wertmüller produced an exclusive, limited vinyl release for D.I.E. together with Albert Oehlen, who designed the cover: the album Im Schwung with singer Christina Daletska, Ruhrtriennale 2021.

 


Michael Wertmüller / Albert Oehlen, Im Schwung, Christina Daletska, Ruhrtriennale 2021.

 

“Sometimes I have ideas about music that is not yet known or has not yet existed in this form. To me, art is also largely connected to utopias and I try to get into this area where utopia can perhaps also become reality.”
Gabrielle Weber

Sonderband Musik-Konzepte Michael Wertmüller, edition text+kritik, Hg. Ulrich Tadday, Dezember 2024.

Am 25.1.25 erlebt Wertmüllers nächste Oper die Uraufführung:
Israel in München, Uraufführung 25.1.25 Staatsoper Hannover.

Peter Brötzmann, Dieter Schnebel, Albert Oehlen, Christina Daletska, Marino Pliakas

broadcasts SRF 2 Kultur
Musik unserer Zeit, 18.12.2024: Michael Wertmüller und das Trio Steamboat Switzerland, Redaktion/Moderation Gabrielle Weber.

Neue Musik im Konzert, 18.12.2024: Michael Wertmüller im Konzert, Redaktion/Moderation Gabrielle Weber.

Neoblog, 3.10.2020: Michael Wertmüller: “..der grösste Beethoven-Fan aller Zeiten..”, Autorin Gabrielle Weber.

neoprofiles
Michael Wertmüller, Steamboat Switzerland, Lucas Niggli, Dominik Blum, Titus Engel

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Composer Jessie Cox: with music through the planets

Jessie Cox is many things: drummer and composer, Assistant Professor at Harvard University and Swiss citizen with roots in Trinidad and Tobago. In his music and research, he refers to Afrofuturism and travels through earthly and cosmic spaces. His first book will be published in February 2025.

Friedemann Dupelius
“Space is the Place” is what Sun Ra declared on his 1973 album by the same name. The African-American composer and bandleader not only dreamed of space as an imaginary destination – for him, it was also a metaphor for a new and progressive world in which black people would be better off than on Earth. Jessie Cox takes Sun Ra literally: his piece Enter the Impossible Cosmos leads us through a musical universe. He developed it in 2022 for the Sun Ra Arkestra, which continues to exist more than 30 years after the death of its founder.

Jessie Cox grew up in Biel/Bienne, Switzerland and now lives in Boston (USA) / © Adrien H. Tillmann

Instead of Venus and Saturn, the planets in Cox’s cosmos have names such as KB, RT or LBD-Moon and instead of a rocket, the journey takes place in the virtual world of the “Unity” gaming platform, which also hosts the visual score of the music. Ideally, the audience also sees this world on a screen during the performance, as the musicians move through virtual space and experience various so-called ‘adventures’.

The musical space of planets

Enter the Impossible Cosmos has elements of a role-playing game: the planets have different characteristics – their gravity, their atmosphere (i.e. gaseous), their distance from the sun and the possible forms of life on them (i.e. ‘sound-based life’). This should encourage the musicians to imagine their own sounds, matching the planets they are currently on during their journey in the piece. Musical orientation is provided by certain pitch ranges and timbres that are assigned to the planets. “The planets are metaphors for musical spaces,” explains Jessie Cox. “It’s about creating a space in imagination through sound. Imagining other worlds is central to Afrofuturism – even if it’s just a small, better world that we can create in music.”

A performance of “Enter the Impossible Cosmos” with an ensemble from KASK & Ghent Conservatory from 2022

The musicians do this by choosing a “character”, i.e. by slipping into a specific role. Each character has different abilities to move around the cosmos and interact with others: “It’s about relationships, about encounters – I like that word with that sci-fi undertone,” says Cox. Finally, the adventures are instructions to move around in the imagined universe, to change position or even planet (i.e. sound world). No two performances of Enter the Impossible Cosmos are the same; each one is a journey into the unknown. It can be undertaken by ensembles of any size and with any cast.

Bending the white space

Jessie Cox’s composition Black/blackness – After Mantra(s) for solo piano is also based on the same principle, the same game world. It was created during an “encounter” with pianist Simone Keller and can be found on her album Hidden Heartache, which is dedicated to marginalised composers of the last 100 years. It is programmed into this piece that the planets change depending on how often you have travelled them. The pianist is equipped with “sense organs” – a special set of methods for playing the piano.

“Black/blackness – After Mantra(s)” was released in 2024 on Simone Keller’s album “Hidden Heartache”

Before the journey through the planets begins, Simone Keller plays a scale at the beginning of Black/blackness – After Mantra(s) – that seems to descend endlessly, then ascends, until suddenly there is a too large interval: the well-tempered space of the white keys, which are always arranged at the same distance from each other, is bent and broken up. For Jessie Cox, this is also a reference to an acoustic phenomenon: “White noise contains all frequencies in equal proportions. As part of sound art, white noise is established today and marks whiteness as a certain, normative condition of existence. But I want to break this up. I like that the concept of noise is ambiguous in German (“Rausch” can be translated with intoxication or frenzy induced by states of mind and/or drugs).” Jessie Cox’s aim is to open up spaces in which the absurd can take place and to use them in order to reflect on our relationship to them, the environment and life in general. “This also means thinking about exploitation, colonialism and anti-blackness – but also, more positively: about blackness, creolisation, utopias and solidarity!”

Jessie Cox’s book “Sounds of Black Switzerland” was published by Duke University Press in February 2025

Jessie Cox’s research and thoughts have now culminated in a book: Sounds of Black Switzerland was published in February 2025 – the first book dedicated to Black music in Switzerland. “The terms ‘Black Switzerland or Afro Swiss’ could hardly be found in any publication during the writing process. I want to open up a discourse, find a language where there isn’t one yet. Music can be a method for this.” Across the genres, from new music to rap and electronic to pop, Cox presents musicians and pieces and uses them to discuss “Black Life” in Switzerland. Last but not least, Jessie Cox wants to inspire new ways of listening – through the book and through his music. There is a vast, as yet unknown space that we can explore with our ears.
Friedemann Dupelius

Website Jessie Cox
Website Sun Ra Arkestra
The virtual game world of „Enter the Impossible Cosmos“
Simone Keller: Hidden Heartache on Bandcamp
Book: Sounds of Black Switzerland (Duke University Press)

Also on neo.mx3:
neo.mx3: Simone Keller –  forgotten piano music rediscovered
neo.mx3: New listening environments for new music (Jessie Cox at Lucerne Festival Forward)

Neo profiles:
Jessie Cox, Simone Keller

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Marc Kilchenmann: The versatile

Marc Kilchenmann doesn’t like to repeat himself, what he appreciates is delving deeper when he takes on a subject. For his piece Murhabala, he focussed the women’s struggle for freedom in Iran. In the musical form, overtone and undertone structures meet and clash, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in dissonant frictions.
A portrait by Friederike Kenneweg

 

The composer Marc Kilchenmann. Portrait with a hat. Foto: Paul Wyss
Der Komponist Marc Kilchenmann. © Paul Wyss

 

Friederike Kenneweg
“I don’t know exactly why, but Persia, Iran – fascinates me since I’ve been a child,” says Marc Kilchenmann. “It has also stayed very present in my life later on. I learnt a bit of Persian, watched a lot of Iranian films and read Iranian poetry. What I particularly like is the language. It is said to be the most metaphor-rich language in the world.”

When Kilchenmann finds something that he is not yet familiar with, he is delighted. This was also the case when analysing US composer Ben Johnston’s string quartets, on which he wrote his doctoral thesis. “With Johnston, I once counted fifteen different third intervals. It felt like the ground was being pulled out from under my feet. That’s great. I said to myself: I don’t know anything. Fantastic!”

 

Maths and music, Iran and Ben Johnston

These two areas of interest meet in his work Murhabala for the microtonal keyboard instrument rhesutron and string quartet. Marc Kilchenmann discovered a mathematical treatise on binomial coefficients from the 11th century Persian polymath Omar Chayyām. He uses this, as well as the harmonic concept of Utonality and Otonality by composer Harry Partch, who had a significant influence on Ben Johnston, to find his musical structure. The term ‘otonal’ refers to intervals that can be formed using the overtone series, while those that are formed with the undertone series are called ‘utonal’.

 

Marc Kilchenmann, Dominik Blum and the Quatuor Bozzini after the first night of Murhabala in Kunsthaus Walcheturm, Zürich. © Doris Kessler
The piece ‘Murhabala’ was commissioned by Dominik Blum on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Dominik Blum and Marc Kilchenmann together with the Quatuor Bozzini after the world premiere of ‘Murhabala’ in Kunsthaus Walcheturm, September 2024. © Doris Kessler

 

The Persian word Murhabala means “juxtaposition”. In his piece, Marc Kilchenmann juxtaposes utonal and otonal interval structures. The string quartet, which mainly plays sustained ground notes, only moves in the otonal harmonic space. The rhesutron plays ornamental lines and uses both otonal and utonal intervals. As the piece progresses, the harmonic structure becomes increasingly complex. When the overtone series is combined with the undertone series, perfectly pure-sounding intervals are in some cases created. Mostly, however, tones meet at a distance that lies outside the traditional tonal system.

 


Murhabala for Rhesutron and string quartet, Recording 23.9.2024 in the Kantonsschule Küsnacht. Dominik Blum and Quatuor Bozzini

 

Waves like revolutionary movements

“You can listen to my piece in a very linear way, but you can also pay close attention to the harmony, you can just follow the string instruments or simply let your mind wander,” says Marc Kilchenmann. One thought that occupied him while composing were the women in Iran, who are constantly fighting against oppression and for their freedom. The harmonic connections that result from the structure of Murhabala resemble wave structures that are reminiscent of the ups and downs of protest being defeated and then re-strengthened. Marc Kilchenmann would like to emphasise this aspect even more clearly in the next version. “The waves that I actually imagined, this perseverance, this coming back again and again, that’s something that I don’t hear enough of in the piece. I’m going to emphasise that even more.”

 

The unfamiliar and the unknown

As intensively as Marc Kilchenmann has now explored overtones and undertones, his next composition will probably be about something completely different. After all, it is the unknown that appeals to him time and time again. “I would like to study something completely different again. I probably won’t do that now, because time is also finite. But I like dealing with completely different things and experiencing this unfamiliarity again: That’s a nicer state than knowing everything already. What could one expect from life then?”
Friederike Kenneweg

Omar Chayyām, Ben Johnston, Harry Partch, Quatuor Bozzini

neo-profile
Marc Kilchenmann, Dominik Blum, Kunstraum Walcheturm

 

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Andreas Eduardo Frank: Collaborative composing and meta-composing

Since the 2024/2025 season, Composer Andreas Eduardo Frank is the new Artistic Director & Co-Director of Basel’s Gare du Nord, one of the most important venues for contemporary music in Switzerland. Frank’s own works are multimedia, playful, humorous and often more political than one might think at first glance. A portrait by Jaronas Scheurer

The composer and new Artistic Director of Basel’s Gare du Nord, Andreas Eduardo Frank.

Jaronas Scheurer
Andreas Eduardo Frank is the new artistic director of the Gare du Nord and he is also a member of the programming team of the Neue Musik Rümlingen Festival. As a result, he no longer gets to compose at the moment, as he says in an interview. “I have to be honest, I’ve spent a lot of the last ten years sitting behind a desk and putting notes on paper. It’s a lonely job and I’m actually a rather social kind of person. Curating is some kind of meta-composing, especially when you collaborate with people, exchanging and realising ideas together.”

For Frank, the switch from composing to curating does not feel like a rupture. Even by looking at his earlier pieces, the collaborative nature of his compositional methods becomes apparent, which he emphasises in the interview: “I like to be inspired by the people I write for: What kind of sound, what kind of action, what kind of moment suits them?”

Yes, No, Maybe

However, not only his working methods have a strong social dimension, but also his very pieces. In the 2020 work Yes Yes No No, Yes No No No for violin, saxophone, accordion, percussion, electronics and video, played here by the Concept Store Quartet, Frank explored the dimensions of meaning of the words yes and no.

“I was interested in this grey area between yes and no, between one and zero. A ‘yes’ can sound beautiful, brutal, aggressive, strained, dismissive.” Frank started with these two everyday words and analysed their meaning and sound. Then there was the video aspect of the work. In the video as well as on stage, performers can be seen saying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in different ways. “I found this an interesting constellation,” says Frank. “There are four performers on stage who all just say ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Then there are their digital avatars, who do the same. This creates very different social constellations between real performers and digital doubles, between individuals and group constellations, between various media levels. It’s a kind of social microcosm.”

New Music and politics

Andreas Eduardo Frank’s work thus has a clear socio-political dimension, which he immediately confirms: “I believe that music and art need to have an attitude towards society, to be reflected or can be heard in the music. Of course one can escape into music as a kind of ideal world. But reality is not intact.” The danger however, is for the music to become propaganda. Frank’s antidote to this is virtuosity: “I don’t want to tell anyone what he or she should think,” he says in the interview. “I want to create spaces of thought into which one can briefly dive and then a new space opens up the next moment. In this way, I try to establish some kind of virtuosity in thought form.”

Can one sing faster than the speed of light?

Another piece by Frank, Restore Factory Defaults (2017), is also centered on virtuosity. The starting point for the composition, which he developed with singer Anne-May Krüger, was the idea that one can sing faster than the speed of light. However, this actually absurd question puts us right in the middle of the extremely real everyday life of a musician. Frank’s piece is about virtuosity, competition and the power of performance.

In the piece, Anne-May Krüger sings against digital doppelgangers and the projected light choreography, which repeatedly leaves her in the dark. The various media levels such as video, light and audio recordings serve both as a virtuoso extension of the mezzo-soprano’s vocal abilities and as a media machine that she fights against.

Restore Factory Default is simultaneously a humorous examination of the limitations of human physical abilities, a multimedia virtuoso piece for a singer and a cultural-political reflection on the absurd competition between humans and machines. “On the one hand, I was interested in ‘enhancing’: So – how can I make this even more virtuoso with media means?” says Frank. “But at the same time, it’s a battle between the machine, which operates with light and the sound, which comes primarily from humans. I sometimes have the impression that behind this multimedia trend in contemporary music lies an escape from working with sound. I wanted to turn this around and therefore asked myself: can one sing faster than light?”

Andreas Eduardo Frank performing live with a modular synthesizer.

A safer harbour for sound experiments

This gentle criticism of contemporary music also brings us back to his current work as the Gare du Nord’s artistic director: “The Gare du Nord should be a place for sound experiments and a safe harbour for other approaches that may not belong to the mainstream. I want to dust off contemporary music and increasingly offer a platform to the younger generation.”
Jaronas Scheurer

Broadcast SRF 2 Kultur:
Kultur Kompakt from the 17th of October 2024 (from 00:25:51): Jaronas Scheurer reports on the opening production of this year’s season of the Gare du Nord.

Neo-profiles:
Andreas Eduardo Frank, Concept Store Quartet, Anne-May Krüger

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Nora Vetter / Performative contexts

Nora Vetter, Lucerne based viola player and composer, benefited in 2023-2024 of the Migros Culture Percentage’s Double Classic network. Each year, this mentoring platform enables several musicians to work on a specific project in depth and supported by a coach. On this occasion, we look back at her creative process and her impressions after a year of coaching, which led to the production of a new work for solo drums. A Portrait by Alexandre Babel.

 


Portrait Nora Vetter zVg. Nora Vetter

Alexandre Babel
After completing a master’s degree in contemporary music in Basel, Nora Vettter moved to Lucerne, where she is actively involved as a violist with the Latenz ensemble and the Kulturbrauerei collective, producing events with the Forum Neue Musik and working on performance projects with the VAMM! collective. She is one of those instrumentalists whose multifaceted involvement in a wide range of contemporary contexts has led her to a questioning regarding her own creative power. So since 2019, she has been developing a body of compositional work, a personal way to structure the link between space and musical action.

“I like writing for specific places, that’s how I started. My first project took place in the disused grain silos of Altdorf in the canton of Uri in 2019. The architectural space was extraordinary, with a reverberation time of almost fifteen seconds. I presented two sound works there. One consisted in dropping pieces of dry bread from the opening in the roof of the silo. On the floor, two assistants had to collect the crumbs and place them in bags. This produced a series of small bombs whose impact on the ground, enhanced by acoustic reverberation, formed the sound structure’s basis”. Seemingly performative and phenomenological, this first action harbours a desire to sculpt sound and organise it in temporal space. At the same time, the architectural context is so important here that it will influence the perception of the sound phenomenon. These are concerns that Nora Vetter likes to emphasise, regardless of the formal context of her work.

In 2022, at the closing concert of the Festival Forward as part of the Lucerne Festival, the VAMM! collective she formed with Urban Mäder, Peter Allamand and Pia Matthes presented Ein sauberes Ende, a ‘collective intervention’ in which a group of nearly thirty performers undertook a clean-up action at the end of the concert. “The performance wasn’t really a conventional clean-up,” explains Vetter, “and we introduced tools that weren’t part of the building’s equipment, such as waste pliers and leaf blowers, which scattered the scores at the beginning of the piece.”

 

 

Urban Mäder, Peter Allamand Pia Matthes et Nora Vetter, Ein sauberes Ende, UA Lucerne Festival Forward, Konzertsaal KKL, November 2022.

 

When asked about the compositional aspect of such an intervention, Vetter explains: “While the initial idea was indeed to clean the space while the audience was still seated in the auditorium, we gradually added a musical dimension to the action. I would define this piece more as a composition, since we paid attention to the succession of sounds and the superimposition of sound textures that we consciously wanted to hear in a certain order.”

Nora Vetter further represents this duality between performative action and musical structure in works such as Dream Paralysis, a concert piece written in 2021 for the Latenz ensemble. “Whereas my work in Altdorf’s Grain Silos was adapted to an existing location, Dream Paralysis is dedicated to a particular group of people. But I needed an extra element with which I could shape the visual space. I turned to the use of light, distributing it in several distinct layers: neon tubes and torches operated by the performers and stage lights that drew different tableaux programmed according to the musical form. These elements form the starting point for a space dedicated to dreams”. The piece, inspired by the cycles of sleep, plays with the combination of perceptive sources. Vetter furher explains: “When the light dims, perception changes. In fact, as soon as the visual field is dimmed, the ability to perceive other elements increases and I like that idea.”

 

 

Nora Vetter, Dream Paralysis

 

In Dream Paralysis we find the use of performed gestures that are not linked to the production of sound, but which play an active part in the compositional dramaturgy. A performative attribute which, on the surface, distances this work from Nora Vetter’s latest production, Patch work, developed during her mentoring year. “Patch work is an acoustic drum solo, written for percussionist Ruben Bañuelos. It’s a piece of pure music, the antithesis of a work like Ein Sauberes Ende,” Vetter explains. Yet the composer’s performative concerns have not been forgotten. “What really interested me during the mentorship was becoming aware of the potential connotations of an instrument, in this case the drums. The very presence of a drum kit on stage is in fact already a performative statement.” We might well wonder, then, whether the reduction in means has not actually enabled the composer to isolate the very essence of the stage gesture. “Percussion is incredibly choreographic in itself,” concludes Vetter. “The gestures Ruben makes to produce the sound, some of them very subtle, already tell the story of a world. Finally, with this piece, I feel like continuing the work I started years ago.”
Alexandre Babel

Portrait Nora Vetter zVg. Nora Vetter

Latenz Ensemble, Kulturbrauerei Luzern, Forum Neue Musik Luzern, Ruben Bañuelos

émissions SRF Kultur :
neoblog, 11.11.2022: Das Lucerne Festival Forward nimmt “ein sauberes Ende”, Autor Jaronas Scheurer.

neoprofiles :
Nora Vetter, Urban Mäder

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Tapiwa Svosve grinds saxophone sounds into the sewage system

Young jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve (*1995) was awarded one of this year’s BAK music prizes. Svosve does not commit himself to any particular style, switching agilely between free jazz, ambient, noise and progressive rock. However, his musical practice is firmly rooted in the jazz tradition.

The jazz saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve from Zürich / Porträt zVg. Tapiwa Svosve.

Jaronas Scheurer
Tapiwa Svosve already achieved a lot, considering his young career: shortly after graduating from Zurich Jazz School, he won the ZKB Jazz Prize with the band District Five, followed by a performance with jazz legends Hamid Drake and William Parker and a year of work for the City of Zurich, where he organised and curated the Zurich Taktlos Festival and co-founded transdisciplinary art collective Gamut. He has performed in productions by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Wu Tsang, made music for the Louis Vuitton fashion show, released numerous albums – solo, with his various bands or, for example, the album The Sport of Love in 2023 with American electronic producer Asma Maroof and English cellist Patrick Belaga, whom he met during his collaboration with Wu Tsang. In 2024, this remarkable career was crowned with a tour of Southeast Asia and one of the coveted BAK Music Prizes.

Tapiwa Svosve sounds in G Major Kinda Love from the album The Sport of Love very tender. However, that is just one side of his diverse oeuvre.

Financial scarcity and artistic consistency

Nevertheless, Svosve is just barely getting by financially: “I mainly live off my music. Sometimes it goes alright and sometimes less,” he says during the interview, “Maybe you get to play a lot, but then there’s another dry spell and you limit yourself: you don’t go out anymore, maybe you only eat rice with soy sauce. I can accept that if it then goes up again.” The BAK prize and prize money came at just the right time: “I was really worried about how I was going to make ends meet over the next few months. The prize took me from one reality to a completely different one: One day I had minus twenty francs in my account and the next day I suddenly had this huge prize money.”

The financial scarcity is probably also due to Svosve’s artistic consistency, who hardly, if at all, submits to sales arguments or marketing strategies. “An improvisational approach is fundamental as far as I’m concerned – be it in a jazz trio, in a noise band or when I make ambient music: being open to the potential of collaborations and seeing where this constellation of people takes you.” Svosve sees himself as a jazz musician: “I was musically socialised through jazz, in what other Western musical tradition is this extreme openness at to be found?”

Jazz and community

For Svosve, the openness and improvisational approach of jazz go beyond the actual music making . His work as an organiser and curator has also been influenced by these values: “The fact that I not only make music, but also proactively create spaces for music that the mainstream may not yet be ready for, is an essential part of being a musician for me and looking back at jazz history, this has always been an important part.”

A jazz musician in very different echo chambers

Svosve is essentially a jazz musician. He studied jazz history intensively and also teaches jazz history at the Winterthur Institute for Contemporary Music (WIAM), allthough this is hard to hear in some of his projects.

It characterises his way of being and working rather than the actual musical results. A good example is the album “A Lung in a Horn in a Horn”, released in 2022. In a nocturnal action, he and artist, label operator and sound designer Rafal Skoczek climbed into a large, open pipe that was laid under the Sihl and Limmat rivers. The album was then created there – just him, the saxophone and the psychedelically reverberating Zurich sewerage system, recorded by Skoczek. There was no major clarification of what was possible or legal. There were no rehearsals, no sound check: “The aim of the action was more the way to get there than the actual result. But I still like the record today. It’s so purist. It’s not so much about my playing, but more about how this tunnel actually sounds when I grind saxophone sounds into it.”
Jaronas Scheurer

Tapiwa Svosve and his saxophone, here in A Lung in a Horn in a Horn, recorded in the sewage of Zürich.

Broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musikmagazin, SRF 2 Kultur, 28.9.2024: Preisgekrönt: Der Saxophonist Tapiwa Svosve: Tapiwa Svosve in an interview with Jaronas Scheurer.

Neo profiles:
Tapiwa Svosve, Swiss Music Prizes

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Sol Gabetta awarded the Grand Prix Suisse de musique 2024

A portrait of cellist Sol Gabetta by Florian Hauser

Sol Gabetta, cellist, cosmopolitan and Swiss by choice, was awarded the Grand Prix suisse de musique 2024

Florian Hauser
What does it take for a global career in classical music? Talent, luck, a strong personality and last but not least, the willingness to get involved in teamwork, i.e. working with an artist agency, press agency and record label. Sol Gabetta does it all.

 

Sol Gabetta © Julia Wesely

 

When her career began, thirty years ago, she would never have dreamed of it. ‘I was a romantic musician, a young woman with high hopes of getting to know everything about art and music – everything was open.’ After the happiness of a sheltered childhood in Argentina, where Sol Gabetta was encouraged to the best of her ability, developped her passion and became a strong, self-confident person in a protected space, she took off. In 1998, at age 17, she won the 3rd prize at the prestigious ARD Music Competition. In 2004, something like a turbo ignited: the Credit Suisse Young Artist Award brought her maximum attention. She founded her own festival, won one prize after another and soon the big orchestras – like Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and many others – were lining up. Festivals invited her, and from 2010 she was also featured in the magazine KlickKlack on Bavarian television, since then Sol Gabetta has been omnipresent in the media.

 

Teamwork is everything

One thing leads to another. A CD label, an assistant, an agency, Sol Gabetta begins to build a team around her and has a knack for it: “You develop fine and sensitive antennas to sense what you really are, what you really want.” She trained in Basel with cellist Ivan Monighetti, who is still a coach for her today when she needs him. She met Christoph Müller, who increasingly mutated from cellist to music manager, was her partner for a time and now looks after her Swiss management, including her Solsberg Festival. She met her current partner, the violin maker and restorer Balthazar Soulier, who can take care of all the minor and major issues of her almost 300-year-old Goffriller cello or the Stradivarius cello from 1717.

Largely thanks to a large network in the background, Sol Gabetta is as free and uncompromising in the organisation of her tours as she is in her choice of repertoire: ranging from all eras to the comtemporary works such as the Concerto en Sol, which grandmaster Wolfgang Rihm wrote for her four years ago.

 


Wolfgang Rihm, Concerto en Sol, Cellokonzert für Sol Gabetta (2018-19), Kammerorchester Basel, conductor Sylvain Cambreling, concert recording world creation: Victoria Hall Genève 2020.

 

The volcano

“I’m a bit like a volcano, but a calm one. I really do have this clarity about what I’m looking for and which path I want to take. Of course, there are also uncertainties and that’s why I just try to have important people around me.” Discipline and routine are also important. “As soon as I wake up, I actually do the most important thing: practise. The learning process in my brain needs to be fresh, and the few hours I have left in the morning are golden.”

Sol Gabetta is a happy example of how a soloist floats through the market. She knows how to act on and off the stage with the right instinct, positive charisma and an engaging personality, with the necessary drive and enthusiasm to inspire the audience.
Florian Hauser

 

ARD Musikwettbewerb, Credit Suisse Young Artist Award, Wiener Philharmoniker, London Philharmonic Orchestra , KlickKlack, Ivan Monighetti,  Solsberg Festival, Gautier Capucon, Jean-Guihen Qeyras, Nicolas Altstaedt, Truls Mörk, Daniel Müller-Schott, Bruno Philippe, Johannes Moser, YoYo Ma, Giovanni Antonini, Simon Rattle, Christian Thielemann, Jacqueline du Pré, Alisa Weilerstein, Julia Hagen, Wolfgang Rihm

broadcasts SRF Kultur
Passage, SRF Kultur, 13.9.2024: Teamwork ist alles. Cellistin Sol Gabetta und das Musikbusiness, author Florian Hauser.
Musikmagazin, Grand Prix suisse de musique für Sol Gabetta, SRF Kultur, 25.5.24 (ab Min 06:00): Talk: Sol Gabetta im Gespräch mit Florian Hauser.
neoblog, 10.1.2020: Melancholische Eleganz – Wolfgang Rihm schreibt für Sol Gabetta, author Gabrielle Weber.

neo-profiles
Sol Gabetta, Wolfgang Rihm

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Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri and the independence of objects

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works are fascinating for seeing and hearing. Her pieces, which consists of a variety of objects, sound installations and performances, surprise visitors and listeners with the simplicity and elegance of their functioning. During my meeting with the artist, we discussed the intimate relationship between objects and sound.

 

Portrait Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri zVg. Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri

Alexandre Babel
By entering the exhibition, a sound composition consisting of a multitude of short pulses fills the room. The sounds are so close together that one perceives a single, constantly moving structure. By approaching the object constituting Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandris Modular n.3, the source of the sound moves closer to the visitors’ ear and he or her begins to distinguish the individual impulses from one another. The closer one gets to it, the more this installation object reveals its identity and sound. It is a continuous rotating movement that generates sound impulses through friction with a nylon thread, amplified by loudspeakers.

 

 

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, modular n.3, en collaboration avec Pe Lang, 2019.

 

The produced music, the third in a series of the same name created in close collaboration with artist Pe Lang, is therefore practically inseparable from its physical appearance. While the collection of loudspeakers creates a sound universe in its own right, understanding the production mechanism unfolds a narrative that reveals a concrete and poetic dimension. “I like to draw the audience’s attention to the way in which an instrument is built. In my opinion, the structure of my works is also based on the understanding of how they work”, explains Papalexandri-Alexandri.

 

Modular n.3’s principle is also reflected in other works by the artist, such as Untitled n.V or Speaking of Membranes and raises the question of the expectations associated with an object’s function. A loudspeaker is normally used to spread sound by amplifying electric energy. In this case, however, the loudspeakers are not connected, as the sound is acoustic.

“You recognise that it’s a loudspeaker, but I want to give it a privileged space, I want to hear its own voice.” If Papalexandri-Alexandri draws the audience’s attention to the essence of the object by making it vibrate through the movement device, what does it look like when the installation is not switched on or the object is exhibited as inanimate matter? The artist continues: “Sometimes I wonder what happens when a sound or musical object does not produce sound, is it a dead object? I think that every musical object is functional. When you set it in motion, you are exploring a certain kind of functionality. But maybe there are different functionalities to be explored on the same object.”

In Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, a piece that was composed for recorder player Susanne Fröhlich, with whom Marianthi Papalexandri Alexandri has a long-term relationship, the connection to the instrument bypasses once again conventional expectations. A recorder, dismantled into its individual parts, is presented spread out on a table. On the same table a motorised device sets wires in rotation. These are connected to membranes stretched over the open parts of the recorder. The result is reminiscent of long waves of sound. “As we have dismantled the instrument, you can only see fragments of it”, explains the composer. Once more, the use of a musical object that is normally associated with a specific use, in this case the production of sound by blowing into the mouthpiece, is transformed into a sound manifestation produced by the instrument itself. Papalexandri-Alexandri continues: “When you place this instrument on a stage or as part of an installation, it becomes a resonant object. You see it as a body and no longer as a musical instrument that you recognise. This kind of process gives me the feeling of offering the audience a new approach to the instrument, a kind of tribute.”

 

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, salon de musique du 31, Susanne Fröhlich, Festival Archipel Genève, march 2019.

 

Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri’s world reveals an attention to manufacturing precision. The immaculate set-up of the equipment suggests that the artist seeks a certain control over the sequence of events. During the performance, however, the programmed control does give the work a rigid quality, on the contrary, it reveals a dimension of fragility emanating from the possible imperfections associated with the passage of time. In relation to the Solo for generators, motors and wind resonators, the composer tells us that control is never absolute. “When I play with this device myself, I can feel it and create beautiful sounds, and the same goes for Susanne (Fröhlich). But I’ve also experienced situations where the device did not work during the performance. This is due to the tension between the performer and the machine, which is necessary for the piece to take shape.”

This duality between control and fragility contributes to the poetic aura of Papalexandri-Alexandri’s works, as she explains: ‘Ultimately, it’s not really about control. My attitude is more about accepting events as they unfold.’ When asked how she would like to develop these events further, she replies: “What’s my personal contribution? I simply want to engage with the existing objects, they already have a lot to tell.”
Alexandre Babel

neo-profiles :
Marianthi Papalexandri-Alexandri, Pe Lang, Festival Archipel

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Linked to the future – Lucerne Academy’s 20th anniversary

Just beautiful concerts? No. At the Lucerne Festival, an academy looks after young musicians and theis interests, be it instrumentalists, composers and/or conductors. The Lucerne Festival Academy brings them all together. Festival director Michael Haefliger and composer and conductor Pierre Boulez came up with the idea for this academy 20 years ago.

 

Benjamin Herzog
It’s a hot saturday afternoon by the Lake Lucerne and the Lucerne Festival has been running at full speed for a good week now. This applies not only to the dense sequence of concerts, debut recitals and free formats for visitors in front of and next to Jean Nouvel’s emblematic Culture and Convention Centre KKL. The first three weeks of the festival are very intense for the participants of the Lucerne Festival Academy as well. 110 in number, from 30 different countries: Instrumentalists, composers and conductors. Some of them will be presenting the fruits of their first phase of work in a concert this Saturday afternoon at the KKL. Pierre Boulez’ enormously difficult Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna for eight instrumental groups, Wolfgang Rihm’s In-Schrift and a piece by Lisa Streich called Ishjärta, which translates “iron heart” in English and in which the composer attempts to express two different emotional states simultaneously.

 

Probe Lucerne Festival Academy, conductor Heinz Holliger © Lucerne Festival / Stefan Deuber.

 

The interaction between performers, lecturers and learners makes sense. British composer Eden Lonsdale, a participant in the Composer’s Programme, says: ‘Working with an orchestra shows you what you have concretely written on your score.’ Chinese composer Yixuan Hu is also happy regarding the artistic-pedagogical triangle built by academy orchestra, conductor and teacher. ‘This collaboration here is unique,’ she says. ’You can get very far very quickly.’ In seminars this year, twelve composers of orchestral music and smaller ensemble pieces discuss new pieces with composers Dieter Ammann and Unsuk Chin, who stood in for Wolfgang Rihm this year, as he passed away in July. The tone is friendly but direct with the clear intention of bringing theory and practice together.

 


Young composer Wolfgang Rihm shocked the audience with his orchestral work ‘Sub-Kontur’ at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1976, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Sylvain Cambreling, SRG/SSR in-house production.

 

With its own orchestra, the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), the Composers Programme, an initiative for conductors who want to deepen their knowledge of new music, and workshops where Academy members can discuss practical performance issues with invited experts from ensembles such as the Ensemble Intercontemporain, Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern and Klangforum Wien, the Lucerne Festival Academy is broadly based. A management workshop and two prizes, the Fritz Gerber Award for instrumentalists and the Roche Young Commissions for composers, round off the programme.

Three weeks of campus atmosphere

Three weeks of campus atmosphere, full of encounters. Former academy students say that the network built up in Lucerne has helped them in their artistic careers, be it for specific questions about a notation, a playing or conducting problem, or simply in a friendly way. The Lucerne Festival itself also actively cultivates bonds between former and current academy members: an alumni programme actively involving former participants in the ongoing academies was founded in 2016.

 


The LFCO performed this year’s composer in residence ‘Reigen’ as a spontaneous pre-programme to the festival opening concert in KKL’s main hall, LFCO, SRG/SSR in-house-production.

 

Composer and conductor Pierre Boulez, who died in 2016 and founded the academy 20 years ago together with Lucerne Festival’s artistic director, Michael Haefliger, explained in an 2016 (the founding year) interview that 20th and 21st centuries’ culture was ‘neglected in educational institutions’, which is why such an academy was urgently needed. It would otherwise be ‘hardly possible’ to concentrate on this repertoire for three weeks over the course of the year. The sceptical attitude of universities towards modern music has certainly changed since then. But concentrated work, as students can tell you, is often made impossible during the semester due to the many other commitments.

 

Lucerne Festival Academy, rehearsal SK14, conductor Sir George Benjamin © Lucerne Festival / Manuela Jans.

 

Wolfgang Rihm, whose role at the Lucerne Festival Academy became leading after Boulez’s death, saw the academy as a necessary and logical addition to the Festival rather than as a special organisation for avant-garde music. According to Rihm, the Academy’s musicians should ‘understand modernism from its roots. These roots reach far and wide and at some point go back to the Romantic repertoire.’ In other words, to Brahms or Schönberg, who play a key role. It is symptomatic that Schoenberg’s monumental Gurrelieder – characterised by both the apotheosis of Romanticism and the emergence of modernism and thus perfectly combining the two festival ideas of ‘concert’ and ‘academy’ – will be performed this year.

 

Arnold Schönberg accompanies the LFCO throughout the festivals. In 2019, the orchestra performed his five orchestral pieces op 1, LFCO, conductor Riccardo Chailly, concert 8.9.2019, KKL Lucerne, in-house production SRG/SSR.

 

During this hot Saturday afternoon’s concert with the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, the high standard at which modern and contemporary music is performed here becomes plain to hear. The orchestra, although most of the musicians met for the first time a week ago, easily mastered the sometimes adventurous difficulties with astonishing precision. With its diverse and large academy, the festival takes on work, it actually wouldn’t be supposed to. After all, music schools and academies should be responsible for the next generation and yet, for a classical music festival, the link with the future generations is of course also one with its own future.
Benjamin Herzog

 

Pierre Boulez, Eden Lonsdale, Yixuan Hu, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, Fritz Gerber-Award, Roche Young Comissions, Unsuk Chin

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 4.9.2024, SRF 2 Kultur, 20 Jahre Lucerne Festival Academy, Autor Benjamin Herzog.
Musikmagazin, 24.8.2024, SRF 2 Kultur, Komponieren an einem Epochenübergang – Lisa Streich, Autor Benjamin Herzog

neo-profiles:
Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra (LFCO), Lisa Streich, Dieter Ammann

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The Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments – a living archive

At only seven years of age the Swiss Museum and Centre of Electronic Musical Instruments (SMEM) already won one of the Swiss Music Awards’ three special prizes. The museum is located in Fribourg and allows to experience technology, history and practice of electronic music-making.

High shelves at the Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music

Friedemann Dupelius
‘The award was a total surprise,’ says Victorien Genna, project coordinator at SMEM, ’we wouldn’t have imagined something like this for at least another few years. It’s wonderful to be a recognised Swiss institution.’ Which is not only recognised in Switzerland. In addition to guests from France and Germany, numerous fans from England, the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand travel to Fribourg to marvel at its impressive collection. SMEM exhibits some 5000 electronic musical instruments, including almost every conceivable type of device: samplers, drum machines, synthesisers, mixing consoles, effects units, amplifiers, recording devices, microphones – even software such as the first version of the now widely used programme Ableton Live from 2001 and the corresponding old computers on which it used to run.

The Hammond Novachord was produced between 1938 and 1942

The shelves rise high to the ceiling of a former brewery – now converted into an area for start-ups and cultural initiatives. But anyone who fears thick layers of dust on the keyboards can be reassured, SMEM sees itself as a ‘living archive’. All of these devices are not only professionally maintained, but can also be played. In the museum’s ‘playroom ’, a wide selection of different instruments is on display, including classics such as the Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines. Visitors can book a session for little money and even record their own jams to take home.

A museum for kids and nerds alike

When asked whether SMEM actually makes a distinction between academic, ‘serious’ electronic music and its pop-cultural varieties, Victorien Genna asks what I actually mean by that – and thus gives an indirect, but clear answer. He is not a musicologist or composer, but joined SMEM as a philosophy student who enjoys playing with synths in his private life. ‘FM synthesis is a good example: it made its way from university laboratories to the consumer market and became world-famous with the Yamaha DX7 in the 80s. Here, the nerds get their money’s worth, you can really go into detail. But even five-year-old children or someone who turned 100 should be able to have fun.’

Children also have fun at SMEM

The first circuit ends on a train journey

The fact that SMEM exists at all is a lucky coincidence, as most of the collection comes from Klemens Niklaus Trenkle – an actor who has been collecting electronic instruments since the 1970s. So many, in fact, that at some point his landlord got fed up and told him to get rid of the stuff. On a train journey, he struck up a conversation with architecture professor Christoph Allenspach from Fribourg. Allenspach had had the idea of opening a music-related museum for years and so the first wiring was unexpectedly successful. The instruments soon moved from Basel to Fribourg, an association was founded and a team of volunteers put together. The museum opened in 2017 and not much has changed since then: The number of instruments is large, the budget small.
Victorien Genna of SMEM has produced a documentary series about instruments from the SMEM collection.

In addition to public funding and private donations, SMEM thrives on volunteers and their commitment, such as Victorien Genna, volunteered until he was recently given one of the museum’s three permanent positions. The volunteers repair instruments, mix concerts or take on bar shifts. The newly received prize is therefore worth more than gold, as the museum’s collection is constantly growing. But how are you supposed to filter out which delay module or wavetable synth will be historically relevant from a flood of new technical releases? ‘Sometimes you can quickly recognise technical revolutions,’ says Victorien Genna, referring to the Elektron Digitakt, released in 2017, ’it was instantly clear upon release, that it would become an important sampler for the 21st century. But often one can only speculate and gets to know after a few years.’ Klemens Niklaus Trenkle still buys new instruments for the museum himself. ‘He has a pretty good feel for what is or will be relevant.’

SMEM organises concerts, workshops and lectures – at least once a month. Several times a year, artists in residence are hosted in Fribourg for one to four weeks to experiment with instruments of their choice. There is no obligation to produce results, but something always comes out of it, which is then usually released on Fribourg’s label oos. In October, the label plans a release by Viennese musician Oliver Thomas Johnson, alias Dorian Concept, who worked with the Yamaha CS01 synthesiser at SMEM. The polyrhythmic meshes of percussive synthesisers begin to groove more and more with each new layer and the 200 beats per minute speed is not noticeable in this agile music. It is a living archive in which history is not only documented, but also actively shaped.
Friedemann Dupelius


Swiss Museum and Centre for Electronic Music Instruments (SMEM)
SMEM on Instagram
The online magazine of SMEM
Dorian Concept on Bandcamp
Klemens Niklaus Trenkle
The album Unconditional Contours by Legowelt, partly composed at SMEM