Schweizer_II
Tracks:
1 - Gary Berger: Turbine (WP)
2 - André Meier: [cross-]cuts/loops (WP)
3 - Jannik Giger: CLASH2 (WP)
4 - Martin Jaggi: Spam
5 - Christophe Schiess: Hibernation (WP)
Swiss compositional creativity is an important theme for “Ensemble Phoenix Basel” in their concert programs. The younger generation of Swiss composers that the “Ensemble Phoenix Basel” commissioned between 2008-2013 are featured in this collection. The one exception is Martin Jaggi. His piece Spam was written in 2006 for the “ensemble für neue musik zürich”. It is based on a microtonal tone-row that can be found in traditional music from the Arabic culture, with which the melodic and harmonic material was determined. The main theme of the piece is developed from the playing of the Salominian bamboo flute.
Gary Berger establishes the connection between moving structures and electrical power, through the stratification and comparison of heterogenous sound material, allowing the sound projection to change according to simultaneously changing “spaces”.
Important influences in the work of André Meier (next to many influences from visual media) included compositions of electronic music, like the work of Thomas Peter, as well as Stravinsky's “Wind sinfonias”, or even the second piece of his “Three Pieces” for string quartet. [cross-]cuts/loops is one of several works to deal with the following themes: a way of creating a broken continuity that can lead to one singular hybrid and, on the other hand, towards both formal clarity and complexity.
For Christophe Schiess, of Biel, the hibernation of marmots is a source of inspiration for questions like: How does music sound when it verges on rigidity? What are the impulses between storing/preserving and spending? What are the dreams between remembering and forgetting?
In his piece CLASH2 Jannik Giger uses a sampler that includes fragments from recordings of two string quartets by Morton Feldman, which are split up into 40 different transpositions and then superimposed. The samples are mixed with the ensemble sound so that both sound-worlds are unnoticeably melted together.
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