A woodland stream, a word from Joyce, ships' horns in Beirut harbour, architectural sketches: the composer Oliver Schneller frequently proceeds from extra-musical patterns, models, and objects trouves in his search for ‘the song present in all things’. Yet he is equally far removed from Messiaen's birdsong and Cage's start charts. His music is neither a "personal confession," nor does he want to extirpate the auteur. Instead, as in Aqua Vit, he subjects the babblings of a woodland stream to spectral analysis and transforms it into a fully autonomous score. Schneller, who studied with Tristan Murail among others, strikes a balance with the dynamics inherent in the material itself. His precisely calibrated compositions always sound at once rigorous and open-ended, and they frequently conjure up surprising associations in the listener. A micro-intervallic canon for piano and live electronics can give rise to a sea of pealing bells, a string trio to an apocalyptic scenario, thanks to his consummate command of digital technology. Born in Cologne in 1966, Schneller comes from a generation of composers who take the computer for granted as one resource among many, as is apparent in such sound installations as his polyphonic urban collage “Polis” for Berlin's Martin Gropius Hall. In his most recent works Schneller, who received a composers’ prize from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation in 2010, has directed his interest toward himself. “Stratigraphie”, for example, is the archaeological model, but not the findings, of a journey of self-discovery. Here, too, his music makes room for the listener's own experiences and emotions in the secret life of sounds, allowing for magical moments of the sort that occur only to those who refuse to force them.