KLAVIERMUSIK is a composition for a pianist and a computer that reacts to the instrumentalist as a "machine musician" : the computer registers the pitch and volume of the piano tone and generates electronic sounds depending on this. These synthetic sound structures are not stored on a tape, but are generated at the moment of performance. Since they depend on the piano playing, piano and machine sounds merge into one instrument. No synthetic sound is created without a piano tone. Certain instrumental tones start or stop sounds, influence speeds, rhythms, pitches or change entire structures of the machine sounds. This technical arrangement makes it possible for the smallest fluctuations in the piano dynamics to have great effects on parameters of the synthetic sounds. In this way, a kind of aleatoricism is created in places within a narrow framework, which does not come from conscious decision-making, but from motoric irregularities of the performer.

KLAVIERMUSIK is a composition about the piano that is also meant satirically. The combination of piano and computer enables additions and exaggerations of the piano sound.

The piano as a percussive instrument, as a melodic instrument and as an orchestral substitute.

4 loudspeaker channels

purely analogue sound sources

The soloist is Susanne Achilles.

INNEN deals with the spectral behaviour of the double bass flute. The use of electronics makes it possible to turn the inner life of the flute sound inside out. Spectrum, pitch and volume are recorded via microphone during the performance in order to use this data flow to influence the appearance of the flute sound itself or of additional synthetic sounds. Modulators and generators are started/stopped, changed by the instrumentalist's playing. In some parts, individual pitches are strongly characterised by being subjected to different modulations or performing different functions. Thus a certain pitch is not amplified at all, another merely appears with artificial resonance, yet another switches the computer programme parts on, etc.. Individual spectral components are isolated and spatially distributed through loudspeakers or subjected to spatial movements. Sometimes they produce qualitatively different synthetic sound levels. The listener thus sits in the middle of an instrumental image.

Since all these processes depend on the flute playing, interpretation has a major impact. 

This virtual situation conveys pictorial processes via loudspeakers that are superimposed on the immediate flute presence. It serves to differentiate and exaggerate certain characteristics of the instrument and thus assembles an overall view of this instrumental phenomenon in the listener. The electronic level does not want to be a counter-world, but to exaggerate the presence of this mechanical instrument. Seemingly random moments arise almost exclusively not from random algorithms, but from irregularities of the instrumental sound.

6 loudspeaker channels

The soloist is Beate Gabriela Schmitt.