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-AlexandriPe LangFestival Archipel

Meta-layers and broken fascination in Léo Collin’s music theatre 


He mixes sound, performance, video and theatre with cooking, sport, thrillers and environmental activism. Young composer Léo Collin born in France and now living in Zurich, produces evocative music theatre happenings. I visited him in his studio, located in Zurich’s Rote Fabrik.

 

Léo Collin working on Corals © Lea Huser

Gabrielle Weber
Most of his small studio is taken up by a simple wooden table, covered with a control desk, microphones, headphones, cables nd with an electric guitar leaning against it. Large, colourful sketches hang on the walls. This is where Léo Collin develops his music theatre pieces, which are always site-specific, i.e. performed in the great outdoors, industrial spaces or petrol stations.

 

Léo Collin, Video: Fastnacht, Neue Musik Rümlingen 2020.

 

Dressed in camouflage suits, performers storm down a grassy hill from a wooded area. They chase each other and perform almost choreographed actions. Fastnacht, a music theatre piece with electroacoustics, premiered on the green meadow at the Rümlingen 2020 festival, focuses on a community celebrating war games. The piece is characteristic of both his musical concept and workflow. Collins’ interdisciplinary site-specific music theatres combine sound with video, electronics as well as theatrical actions and the audience usually right in the thick of it.

“There was little time for the Fastnacht on site-rehearsals and the play was also performed several times, which required precise conceptual preparation and clear instructions for the performers”. The score for Fastnacht is an audio track that uses ‘in ear-headphones’ in order to assign individual actions to each performer. Roles that break the plot are built into the performance and the performers are followed by a sound crew with a microphone (Collin himself) and control desk. “By showing how a scene is recorded, I break the fascination. I like such meta-layers”, says Collin. For the live performance, each audience member receives headphones with live sound and a fictitious audio contribution: this soundtrack creates another meta-layer. ‘Many people play war games like this at home on the weekend. They don’t want to have to experience war themselves. I want to show these dualities’.

 

Fractured re-enactments

Collin creates fractured re-enactments which always come with a personal background: “The idea came from a photograph seen at Zurich’s Photobastei – a nondescript landscape with apple trees entitled ‘Verdun 2017′. My family is from that area. One of the bloodiest battles of the First World War took place in this idyllic landscape in 1916. But the photo shows a harmless subject”. A place always carries history, says Collin. “Through sound, I can add a completely unexpected layer to a picturesque landscape.”

Léo Collin grew up in a small village in the French Jura, studied in Lyon, Geneva and finally at the ZHdK in Zurich, initially musicology, then piano, electroacoustics and composition. He composes electronic music for theatre and dance, including for Schauspielhaus Zurich or Deutsches Theater Berlin and conceives music theatre and educational projects, for example for the Sonic Matter Festival Zurich.

Collins’ work is always oriented towards specific spaces and mostly developed with a fixed group of musicians, the Kollektiv International TOTEM (KIT). He usually also performs himself, involving other musicians and artists. The audience is part of his pieces, it participates musically or is right in the midst of it, surrounded by loudspeakers or equipped with headphones.

 

Léo Collin: Corals © Lea Huser

 

Meaningful places

Locations are also essential in his trilogy, a three-part scenic work entitled Baleen, Medusa and Corals. Corals, the third part, is set in a petrol station, for example. It is the human counterpart of coral reefs, microcosms like cities that appear out of nowhere and grow continuously. “In the vast plains of the USA or Australia, there is often nothing for a long stretch and then suddenly a petrol station full of people, food and petrol, while petrol embodies environmental destruction.”

 


Léo Collin, Corals, music for Gas stations, Ensemble Inverspace, in house-production SRG SSR.

 

Trilogie’s general theme is the concern for biodiversity loss. The three titles Baleen, Medusae, Corals – whales, medusae, corals – stand for different sea creatures and their biospheres. “It’s about the food chain in ‘web food’: the big ones eat the small ones,’ says Collin. “In my youth, ‘No future’, i.e. criticism of capitalism and consumerism, hovered over everything. Today, the topic is still with me.”

 

Medusen took place in a trashy industrial building on the outskirts of Zurich. The audience is divided in four groups, wearing headphones and guided by devices on their mobile phones or by an actor, walking through various rooms in the footsteps of a past crime.

 

A jigsaw puzzle of events

The plot consists of a jigsaw puzzle of events: in the first part, Balleen, between self-awareness group, sports event or TV cooking show, in the second part, Medusen, between crime thriller, concert and reality show: “I was involved in very different things before I started with music. In Trilogie, I explore my childhood and youthful memories and translate them into sound,” says Collin. “As a child, for example, I often sat in front of the television and usually watched sports. I later realised that the commentary is what gave it that kind of magic. My work confronts these memories with contemporary music in the hope of some kind of emancipation.”

 


Léo Collin, Trilogie: Balleen, Corals, Medusen

Trilogy has accompanied Collin’s musical path for many years. The piece is constantly growing, proliferating and changing – like the biospheres within the worldwide web food.
Gabrielle Weber 


An extension of Fastnacht, the music theatre Blind Test, will be performed at the Neue Musik Rümlingen Festival together with Kollektiv International Totem and Hyper Duo on August 24 and 25, 2024.

On 19 June 2025, Léo Collin and the Collegium Novum Zurich will once again devote themselves to biodiversity in Plankton, a music theatre for performers, ensemble and mobile audience (2025, world premiere at Zentralwäscherei Zurich).

neo-profiles
Léo CollinKollektiv International Totem (KIT), Neue Musik RümlingenHyper DuoSonic Matter FestivalCollegium Novum Zürich

Lauren Newton’s vocal artistry

A pioneer of vocal artistry – US-American vocalist Lauren Newton.

Her passion for exploring the full potential of the voice drives her work in free improvisation, jazz and contemporary music. Closely associated with the Swiss experimental music scene, she taught jazz vocal performance and free improvisation at the Lucerne University of Music (HSLU) between 1993 and 2019.

 

Portrait Lauren Newton © Peter Purgar

 

Luca Koch
While her career encompasses a broad range of ensembles, from large jazz orchestras to vocal ensembles and long-standing duos, her concerts are notable for their captivating depth and immediacy. This year Lauren Newton is celebrating her 50th anniversary on stage. For the SRF Culture programme Living Past, I visited her in Tübingen, Germany, where she is currently based and had the chance to listen to groundbreaking live recordings with her.

A twist of fate

Lauren Newton actually wanted to study art in Oregon in the USA, but she didn’t get in and, as a twist of fate, she tried her luck in the music department. Both classical music and jazz were already present at home. Her father played double bass and sang in nightclubs. Lauren also had a good voice and began studying classical singing. In her third bachelor year, she was allowed to take part in an exchange year in Stuttgart. This was unusual for Bachelor students, but her teacher vouched for her and Germany became her new home.

 


Lauren Newton, Sound Songs, SoloImproviation  2006.

 

Classical music student by day, jazz-rock singer by night

In Stuttgart, Lauren began her Masters in the singing class of opera singer Sylvia Geszty and at the same time immersed herself in the city’s young jazz scene. At a jam session, she met trumpeter Frederic Rabold, who was impressed by her voice. A short time later, Newton was singing in his jazz-rock band, the Frederic Rabold Crew. The mix of simply composed themes and free improvisation was ideal for her and allowed her to refine and use previously acquired skills in the more liberated setting of improvisation. Both activities merged seamlessly, it never felt like a double life, she told me in the interview.

 

Vienna Art Orchestra

The Frederic Rabold Crew was invited to Vienna in 1979 for the television programme Bourbon Street, which did not go unnoticed by Swiss jazz musician Mathias Rüegg, who had founded the Vienna Art Orchestra with Wolfgang Puschnig two years earlier. After the TV appearance, he immediately asked Lauren Newton if she wanted to join. For ten years, Lauren Newton was an irreplaceable part of the Vienna Art Orchestra, which became an authority in experimental jazz with dozens of album productions and major tours. Her voice stands out from the jazz orchestra with razor-sharp precision and playful virtuosity. A time that Lauren Newton would not have missed for the world, even if the constant travelling on the tour bus as the only woman was challenging.

 

Vocal Summit

I got to know Lauren Newton personally when she was teaching at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. To me, she was not only an important figure as a vocalist with a wide vocal range, but also as a musician with a great interest in other voices. She not only helped her students to discover their own voices, but also collaborated with other singers on stage time and again. Together with Bobby McFerrin, Urszula Dudziak, Jeanne Lee and Jay Clayton, she formed the vocal all-star band: the Vocal Summit. Together, five completely different voices create soundscapes that breathe. Lauren Newton also continued her work with voices in larger formations with vocal ensemble Timbre.

 

Vom Vom Zum Zum

Lauren Newton has made a name for herself as an experimental vocalist who expresses herself particularly through sounds. But working with text also plays an important role in her music, which is plain to see and hear in her particularly influential collaboration with Austrian poet Ernst Jandl. His poems were deconstructed and reassembled, words were twisted, stretched and spoken backwards. The album Vom Vom Zum Zum, on which Ernst Jandl speaks while Lauren Newton plays around his words, was a special discovery for me.

 


Pi from Vom Vom Zum Zum, Lauren Newton with Wolfgang Puschnig, Mathias Rüegg, and Uli Scherer, 1988.

 

Duos in dialogue

Free improvisation is like a musical conversation. The players respond to each other, they comment, agree or argue. This works best in a duo, Lauren Newton tells me in the SWR studio in Tübingen and duo recordings form a large part of her oeuvre, featuring collaborations with Anthony Braxton, Phil Minton, Aki Takase and Joëlle Léandre, for example.


O How We, Lauren Newton and Phil Minton performed together on stage for the first time at the A Voix Haute Festival in Bagnères de Bigorre, France, on August 13, 2010.

The double bassist Joëlle Léandre in particular has accompanied her to this day. Their deep musical friendship is reflected in their interplay. The rich, concise sound of Léandre’s double bass playing perfectly complements Newton’s crystal-clear voice. The duo recently released a new album: Great Star Theatre, San Francisco.
Luca Koch

Lauren Newton and Joëlle Léandre © Friedrich Förster

Frederic RaboldFrederic Rabold CrewMathias RüeggBobby McFerrinUrszula DudziakJeanne LeeJay ClaytonWolfgang PuschnigVienna Art OrchestraErnst JandlAnthony BraxtonPhil MintonAki TakaseJoëlle Léandre.

neoprofile:
Lauren Newton

broadcast SRF Kultur:
Living Past – Lauren Newton, Pionierin der Stimmkunst, 13.02.2024, made by Luca Koch.

World premiere in 100 years?

Music of the future – escaping the Zeitgeist this is the title of a project to celebrate SUISA’s 100th birthday. 40 Swiss musicians were asked to write down their ideas regarding music that will be premiered in a hundred years’ time: A greeting from the present for the year 2123 to hopefully mark SUISA’s 200th birthday. The project was presented at the Yehudi Menuhin Forum in Bern on 16 April 2024. Bettina Mittelstrass spoke to the musicians involved.

 

The composition by HYPER DUO is titled with the number of seconds from now until 2123—3,406,699,560. Here is a roto of HYPER DUO at a Vinylséance on November 21, 2020 © 2020 Pablo Fernandez.

 

Bettina Mittelstrass
Helena Winkelmann, the HyperDuo, Joke Lanz, Martina Berther, Patrick Frank, Annette Schmucki, Fritz Hauser and Nik Bärtsch – these are just seven of a total of 40 Swiss musicians whose music of the future ended up in an archive box in April 2024 without ever being heard. Hermetically sealed, this archive will be supervised by the Swiss National Sound Archives in Lugano for 100 years and displayed in the entrance area of the Città della Musica. The archive will hopefully not be reopened until 2123, when the music will be awakened from its slumber and played for an audience not even born yet.

Leo Hofmann describes his music of the futur in a graphically designed text.

How will Switzerland sound in 100 years?

How will Switzerland sound in 100 years? An initial answer could be lying dormant in the archive box. The answers were not easily found by the 40 respondents. Scepticism prevailed. What instruments will be available in 100 years’ time? Will there still be western musical notation? Wooden instruments? Or will climate change have killed off the trees? Against the backdrop of the planet’s dwindling resources, it is impossible to know whether we will “ultimately have to burn violins and boil strings so as not to freeze or starve to death”, says percussionist Fritz Hauser.

He therefore set his composition in Morse code – in the hope that these archaic signs will inspire people of the future to make rhythmic music, whatever the instrumentation.

 

Fritz Hauser transcribes his music of the future entirely in Morse code. Here is his Schraffur for gong and orchestra, Basel Sinfonietta 2010, an SRG/SSR in house- production.

 

Music as ambassador for interplay?

Despite all the scepticism about what music will mean or enable in 100 years’ time – it will probably retain two social functions, says Swiss-Dutch composer and violinist Helena Winkelmann: acting as ambassador for interplay and mediator as well as integrator of good energy. Another thing is likely to persist in human societies, namely “that people will continue to have problems living together in the future.”

Helena Winkelmann has therefore placed the instructions for a ‘music council’ of the future in the archive box. It is the musical version of a thousand-year-old concept, the “Council of Chiefs” of indigenous American societies. In a circle, musicians take on different functions – both musically and socially. There is – for example – a questioning voice, an inventive voice, a preserving voice, a warning voice, a narrative voice and a developing voice. “That’s also the magic of this whole circle, in the sense that it is the exchange of perspectives that really helps us move forward.”

 


Helena Winkelmann contributes to the archive box with instructions for a ‘Music Council of the Future‘. In Geisterlieder, a cycle based on poems in 18 European original languages accompanied by various instrumental groups, Helena Winkelmann also explores the overcoming of temporal and regional boundaries. World premiere on August 5, 2023, at the Church of Ernen, an SRG/SSR in house- production.

 

A spaceship full of perspectives and criticism of the present

“This little spaceship basically contains a cross-section of current Swiss music creation,” is how ethnomusicologist and curator Johannes Rühl, inventor of the project, describes it. New music, electronic music, jazz, pop and folk music are represented among the 40 composition proposals, as well as sound installations and crazy ideas such as music with mushrooms, whose amino acids can already be converted into sounds today. Another proposal takes the sound of melting glaciers and transports it in the form of DNA into a future in which there will presumably no longer be eternal ice in the Swiss Alps.The sound of melting glaciers transported into the future in the form of DNA.

 

The sound of melting glaciers is transported by Pablo Diserens into the future in listening to glacial thaw in the form of DNA. © Clément Coudeyre.

 

Most of the proposals submitted for the archive box were characterised by a sceptical and socially critical zeitgeist, confirms Johannes Rühl. The attempt to escape the zeitgeist was understandably bound to fail. “We obviously cannot get out of the now. You also get the feeling that there is a dynamic in development these days which did not exist in the past.” Is that true? We won’t be around in 2123 to find out. May those after us play “our” future music or not.
Bettina Mittelstrass

 

Zukunftsmusik – dem Zeitgeist entkommen100 Jahre SUISA. The original idea came from Johannes Rühl, ethnologist and curator of music programmes.
Città della Musica 

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Zukunftsmusik, Passage, 12.4.2014: Redaktorin Bettina Mittelstrass

neoprofiles:
Helena WinkelmanHYPER DUOJoke LanzMartina BertherPatrick FrankAnnette SchmuckiFritz HauserLeo HofmannNik Bärtsch, u.a.

Composing for string quartet with the Arditti Quartet

Gabrielle Weber: workshop with Arditti Quartet at ZHdK

The London-based Arditti Quartet is synonymous with contemporary music for string quartet. Since 1974, the ensemble led by violinist Irvine Arditti, dedicates itself entirely to the contemporary repertoire, both through concerts and recordings as well as in its work with young composers. At the end of February, during a stop on the quartet’s 50th anniversary concert tour, I accompanied the four musicians to a public workshop at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

 

Das Arditti Quartett at the Lecture Performance with Isabel Mundry at ZHdK, 28.2.2024 Foto zVg. ZHdK

 

Gabrielle Weber
In a conversation on the evening before the workshop, after a lecture performance, Irvine Arditti tells me that “a piece is good when it fills time and space well’. The lively star violinist with the characteristic grey mop of curls is always somewhat ambiguous and humorous. The music has to ‘work’, regardless of style or type. He is very open regarding quality criteria: ‘We have played many good and many bad pieces. New pieces must first be given the chance to be played. Only then does it become apparent if they are good or bad’.

 

‘A piece is good when it fills time and space well’

The Arditti Quartet offers precisely such opportunities. Irvine Arditti, first violinist and founder, Lucas Fels, cello, Ashot Sargsyan, second violin and Ralf Ehlers, viola, are curious about young musicians and promote them in a targeted manner. They teach enthusiastically, whether at international festivals such as the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music or at music academies such as the ZHdK.

At the lecture performance, they first explained the general challenges of notating and rehearsing new pieces for string quartet, using pieces by composers renowned for their complex compositional style, like Iannis Xenakis and Helmut Lachenmann, and which they had premiered together.


In a lecture performance, the Arditti Quartet exemplified the challenges of composing for string quartet using the piece ‘Tetras’ (1983) by Iannis Xenakis, SRG/SSR 2023.

 

Together with nine composition students, they rehearsed their new pieces for the final concert the following day. Almost all of them world premieres. Rehearsals take place publicly in the large concert hall.

Schmerzquartett is the title of Franziska Eva Wilhelm’s composition. Wilhelm comes from Munich and has been studying composition with Isabel Mundry in Zurich since autumn 2021. Born in 2003, she is one of the youngest participants in the workshop.

 

Portrait Franziska Eva Wilhelm © Franziska Eva Wilhelm

 

“Pain has a lot to do with friction in my opinion and the sound of string instruments is also created by a kind of friction,” says Wilhelm. “Pain is a difficult subject and I didn’t want to romanticise it. I’m interested in the perception of pain and how it can be embodied in music: rather through texture, than a story”.

 

Humour is a must

On one hand there’s concentration and work, but also a lot of laughter: At one point, the musicians lose their bearings in the score and Lucas Fels lightens things up with an episode: ‘New York, Carnegie Hall!’ was Sergei Rachmaninoff’s loud reply in the middle of a concert he was conducting when a musician asked where they were. Humour relieves tension and brings the composers together.

 


Schmerzquartett by Franziska Wilhelm is about the texture of pain, première by Arditti Quartet,  ZHdK, 1.3.2024.

“That’s all? How’s that?” asks Irvine Arditti at the end of the Schmerzquartett rehearsal, laughing once more. Wilhelm is satisfied, but would like to try out more, which is carried out without question.

Her conclusions after the rehearsal: “I have learnt a lot about specific notations. They leave nothing to chance and if there is something to be decided, the person who composed decides. As a composer, I have to know exactly what I want and be able to communicate it”.

 

Das Arditti Quartett at concert at the main hall of the ZHdK on March 1, 2024. Photo courtesy of ZHdK.

 

Translating notated ideas into sound as precisely as possible

In premières, the quartet always endeavours to translate the notated ideas as precisely as possible into sound. This applies just as much to big names as it does to young, yet unknown musicians, says Irvine Arditti. Several hundred string quartets have been dedicated to the ensemble over the past 50 years and the Arditti quartet has worked on most of them with the composers directly.

“I really want to play the piece the way you want it to sound,” he says again and again during rehearsals, for example to Andrzej Ojczenasz.

Ojczenasz clarifies any last-minute notation errors in advance. This is appreciated. For example, the cello should play an octave lower in the very first bar. “That’s a good start,” the musicians comment with a laugh.

His quartet Maris Stella is inspired by Gregorian chant. “The structure is based on the counterpoint of the chorale. I combine tradition with the present,” the composer explains.

 

Portrait Andrzej Ojczenasz zVg. Andrzej Ojczenasz

 

Ojczenasz comes from Poland. After studying at the Krysztof Penderecki Academy of Music in Krakow, he continued his education at the University of Louisville (USA) and is now completing a master’s degree in composition with Isabel Mundry.

 

Major notation errors may occur

Ashot Sargsyan uncovers a more serious notation error a little later: You have to write exactly what you aim to hear, he says. At the same time, you can feel that the musicians are convinced by the piece. The rehearsal atmosphere is trusting and Ojczenasz gladly accepts the correction.

 


Maris Stella by Andrzej Ojczenasz is based on Gregorian chant, recording of the première by Arditti Quartett, ZHdK, 1.3.2024.

 

Towards the end of the rehearsal, Irvine Arditti asks him as well if he liked it: “Yes, but…’”- He would also like to correct a few passages.

Ojczenaszs summarises his learning as follows: “Write it down precisely, then it will be played like that! And: always be honest with yourself and your message without wanting to portray someone else.”
Gabrielle Weber

The Arditti Quartet in concert at the main hall of the ZHdK on March 1, 2024. Photo courtesy of ZHdK.

 

At the final concert on March 1, 2024, in the main concert hall of the ZHdK, the following were heard:
Wojciech Chalpuka: Wohin jetzt? (UA)
Luis Escobar Cifuentes: Ewige Leben (UA)
Wenjie Hu: The Rift (UA)
Amir Liberson: Emptiness (UA)
Franziska Eva Wilhelm: Schmerzquartett (UA)
Nuño Fernández Ezquerra: Lienzo de Luz (2021)
Fabienne Jeannine Müller: Incertain (UA)
Pengyi Li: … Echo … (UA)
Andrzej Ojczenasz: Maris Stella (UA)
Isabel Mundry: Linien, Zeichnungen (2004)

broadcasts SRF Kultur:
Musik unserer Zeit, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Streichquartett heute, Das Arditti Quartett orund der Nachwuchseditor Gabrielle Weber
Neue Musik im Konzert, 3.4.&14.8.2024: Das Arditti Quartett im Konzert mit jungen Komponierenden, editor Gabrielle Weber

neo-profiles:
Arditti QuartetIsabel MundryFranziska Eva WilhelmAndrzej OjczenaszWojciech ChalpukaLuis Escobar CifuentesWenjie HuAmir LibersonNuño Fernández EzquerraFabienne Jeannine MüllerPengyi Li