A kind of "organized confusion" characterizes the music of Sebastian Claren (b. 1965). "The music should, so to speak, exist without preconditions and should initially refer only to itself. In my estimation, culture and good-breeding are completely out of place in a work of art," says Claren. In his music, this view assumes audible form in a constant alternation between continuity and discontinuity, whether consecutive or simultaneous. It is a game of sophisticated montage techniques involving myriad contrasting splices and a multitude of camera positions translated into music. Yet his stupendously energetic and sometimes highly volatile compositions are not montages in the strict sense; they are not concerned with reproducing things already said elsewhere. Claren is more interested in the dense synchronicity of (inner) events viewed from the vantage point of the self, the composer, who, of course, works with and within past and present-day music. Hence Claren's keen interest in certain styles of pop music, which are no less essential to his aesthetic than the roughly one-hundred years of modern music and it's forerunners.

Shapes that distort themselves and continuously metamorphose into something else are the central part of Gunter Steinke's music. The pieces of solo and ensemble music selected for this CD are representative examples for this compositional concept.

Concentrated sound and unadorned structures, an undercurrent of terse and wilful emotionality, rhythm as a vehicle of expression, instrumental timbre as a means of character delineation, even the emancipation and 'autonomization' of pitch and sonority - all these features have been present from the very beginning in the music of Steffen Schleiermacher, a composer born in the German town of Halle. With one exception the selection on this CD focuses entirely on early but decisive works by this young composer, pianist and ensemble director, and thus ultimately reflects his musical maturation in the former state of East Germany up to and including the year 1988.

In his capacity as Muller-Wieland's teacher and artistic mentor, Hans Werner Henze once remarked: With each new piece, young Muller-Wieland advances yet another mile in his artistic development. His imagination thrives on fresh stimuli from America, France and Italy, producing those gigantic, northern-Germanic blocks and waves of sound – fierce, full of optimism, high spirits and allegria.

J�rg Birkenk�tter's music reveals something like a breakdown or pulverization of form, including the overall formal design. All the same, this breakdown of form also brings about a new florescence of musical shapes that have not yet hardened into convention, or at least have nothing discernibly conventional about them. At this state of formal open-endedness, the chosen material is, as Birkenk�tter himself once put it, compositionally sounded out.

Helmut Zapf worked for many years as a church music director. As can well be imagined, baroque church music - above all that of Johann Sebastian Bach - has become a natural source of inspiration for the composer, not so much because of any specific techniques but for its special unity of tight construction and innate performability. To Zapf, tradition is more than a museum. Spontaneous and impulsive, he reacts to external impressions with a highted sensibility. Yet his performer's temperament is not always comfortable with the detachment necessarily involved in fixed notation. In recent years he has felt the urge to incorporate elements of improvisation in his works, thereby moving one step closer to that style of unbridled, committed music-making thst unites tenderness and strength.

The works presented on this CD mark important stages in evolution of Lutz Glandien's music up to and including autumn 1989. Glandien considers the ability to communicate as music's primary "raison d'être" and has developed a musical language that conveys its meaning through a system of precise, highly expressive gestures.

Andreas Raseghi's First Book of "Farbtonst�cke" unites into a self-contained cycle seven short piano pieces written between 1979 and 1984. Book II, which he started in 1987, is more open-ended in it's form. The second book forms the metaphysical complement of the first. In recent years, Raseghi has taken an increasing interest in jazz. In "winterblue piano" from the Second Book of "Farbtonst�cke", the chords are given individual durations and liberated from the conventions of fixed metre. Unlike early jazz, sound is not related to chord progressions but has emancipated.

Claus Kuhnl's work "La petite mort" is a piece of music theater. But "La petite mort" does not necessarily need a stage to be effective. The staging of the richly illustrative music takes place in the listener's head. "La petite mort": that is a view of the world as of the inner life of the psyche, a reflection of the soul in surprisingly lovely sounds, the result, putting the listener in a contemplative mood, of an introspective phase in the life of the composer, who at the time the work was written said that he was in the process of withdrawing into silence. Kuhnl sees in his concept of music theater the antithesis of opera. He does not conceive it as continuous action with dialogue set to music, but rather as the creation of sign of all kinds. Kuhnl's music theater must be a feast for eyes and ears, a mystical experience, affecting the senses directly, without having to make a detour via the analytical mind. The word plays a secondary role here. Text is sound, words are notes, the voice an instrument treated on an equal basis with the instruments of the orchestra, not dominating them.

Nicolaus Richter de Vroe, one of the strongest talents among the younger composer from Saxony, joined since the mid-eighties produced primarily with instrumental chamber music. And even in the West, he made a sudden talking point after he had won in 1985 at the Cologne Composition Competition "Young Generation in Europe" a price. Previously, Judge de Vroe had (with a major in violin) visited the Special School of Music in Dresden, the university and finally five years the famous Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. There was a lot of opportunity, more modern than in Dresden perceive. Even Cage came up, and began Richter de Vroe to penetrate into the mind of Zen Buddhism. All in all predominate in pieces Judge de Vroes subversive moments against ingrained conventions of composing, playing and listening. They range from the preferred exploring the regions of noise liable - on the individual, detailed game-action (against a collective feeling generated mass al fresco) - up to the incoherent, free child, labyrinthine design of musical progressions. There are, in spite of explosive force, a predominant gestures of violence, combined with a knack for subtle, fragile and aimlessly static, what time - at least in the music of the GDR - a completely new quality possessed, but beyond all probaten forms of aggressive ideological composing differed.

Ernst Helmuth Flammer belongs to that generation of composers of the music of the 70s and 80s as idiosyncratic as haunting and multiform pulses owes. Peter Michael Hamel, Peter Ruzicka, Manfred Trojahn, Walter Zimmermann, Anton Plate, Reinhard Febel and Wolfgang Rihm What Flammer connects with this name, is the effort to reflect the compositional changes after 1950 critical and at the same time creatively continue, that is not about unthinking imitation serial and post-serial music nor a radical rejection of them, but the imitation of musical thinking, which itself recently also committed knows how it's open for future developments.

The music by Robert HP Platz appearing on this disc forms a fairly accurate cross-section of ten years of his work as a composer. The end points are marked by "Maro & STILLE" of 1980 and "From fear of thunder, dreams...", composed in 1988 but not premiered until 1990. These two pieces also reveal Platz's compositional focus during this period: ensemble music. Both are dominated by the winds, and both make use of prerecorded tape, which in "Maro & STILLE" effectively stands in lieu of the chorus. This is all the more remarkable since Platz is one of the few contemporary German composers who deliberately exploit the medium of tape with a high level of technical and artistic expertise. Platz made radical use of his studio work in "REQUIEM", his only piece to date for prerecorded tape.

Arnulf Herrmann's music, which was recorded by the Ensemble Modern for this Super Audio CD (contains both stereo and 5.1 versions) draws it's imaginative prowess and poetic richness from genuinely compositional questions: avoiding conventional formal patterns, it unfolds as multi-layered, multi-dimensional formative processes whose strands interweave like lines in a plot. And just as every plot has characters, the processes in his music are based on sharply defined shapes. What happens to those shapes is best conveyed by metaphors from physics: they are distorted and bent, they shatter and implode - in short, they appear as bodies impacted by a force, which thereby assumes material form and becomes perceivable.

Krebs’s account of his work with the music group “Sohra” applies in all essentials to his music as a whole: “This group takes up an extremely wide range of musical expression – rock, jazz, folk, New Wave, punk, the classical-romantic tradition, contemporary art music, minimal music, non-European music, improvisation and electronic music – but it does not attempt to squeeze these musical forms into a phoney synthesis that would destroy their individual identities. Instead, in a process of free association, they are cross-related, juxtaposed, or allowed to evolve along their own lines on a completely equal footing.

James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet A" by John Cage has been praised by the jury for the international Karl-Szuka Prize 1982 as "exceptional example of the radio art". For it's "nuanced translation of sprachkom�diantischer virtuosity" Klaus Reichert in 1983 auszgezeichnet the prestigious Wieland Translation Prize. In the series Ars Acustica WERGO has now the German and English live performance of "James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet" published - 1987 "NachtCageTag" of WDR Cologne on the occasion of the 75th birthday of the composer, and in 1990 in prominent guests - New York at WDR Sound Art Festival "2nd Acustica International" was added: uva John Cage, Klaus Reichert, Christian Wolff, Richard Kostelanetz, Hans Otte, Mauricio Kagel, Alvin Curran, John Cage's poetic-philosophical speech piece is based on memories of his decades-long study of the works of Joyce, Duchamp and Satie. The composer leads the listener in a zen and Dada world who meet several still living and dead ghosts like a big family party on an imaginary stage by him. A "narrator" leads as Orpheus Theatre this spring Imaginaire lively spirits that have influenced the art of the 20th century - as John Cage himself. John Cage: "The play is not a Alphabet It's a fantasy I wanted to speak to remove from our experience of modernity, the punctuation in order to illustrate by some as her own exciting agility.