Sven-Ingo Koch straddles the narrow dividing line between a fascination with the music's edges, fractures, and anomalies and a desire for unity and harmony within the tradition of European art music: "And yet, despite my experience of insularity, I want to incorporate mutually antagonistic elements in structural processes that will bring them closer together." The title of one of his works, included in this CD has a certain programmatic significance for Koch's music as a whole: "Das �berwinden des groen Klaffens" [Surmounting the Great Divide].

The long-term under the title "Ars Acustica" CD edition realizes outstanding works of acoustic art, as they have emerged in recent decades, in particular for the "Studio Acoustic Art" of the West German Radio in Cologne. "Fever" - a complex sound composition jazz musician Michael Riessler interprets the English dancer, actor, writer and choreographer Nigel Charnock Shakespearean sonnets in permanent excessive movement. With Nigel Charnock I have made a selection of sonnets of Shakespeare that I release it from the sphere of purely literary-historical and want to make it a current discourse about love, loss, grief, hope, ecstasy and doom. The quasi historicizing music of the String Quartet which at times is reminiscent of Henry Purcell and his era, forms the musical context and starting point for the actions of the protagonists between memory and mindfulness - as it were a theater stage in the ear. "Ji-virus" - "A Jingle is exposed to the voraciousness of pirates viruses under the effect of the output motive changed so that seemingly always emerge new meanings same time destroy and degrade the virus the previous and also produce new information in this kind of... manipulation by the style forms is the effect in the foreground, a kind of musical propaganda. How far can the soloist in this synthetic sound world, with his conventional musical instrument seems powerless against it, claiming?

A central concept for Hamel was and is the "harmonic" thinking - the intention of the standardization of heterogeneous elements of conflict resolution, even healing with a new multicultural spirituality / clergy (the religious dimension of such musicality can not be misappropriated). Hamel's pursuit of harmony, conflict freedom, beauty... made on a new stage of development, repressed and unfinished designated... Hamel's music was richer, more complex, konfliktu�ser, she approached the avant-garde sound, without, however, the basic trust each harmonic whole to without.

Hennig usually seeks a narrative perspective. The ideas behind his works, however, should not be misinterpreted as simple programs, but seen as concepts impinging on the work down to the parameters of it's musical fabric. Hennig is keenly interested in the basic experiences of human existence. One might almost call him a phenomenologist illuminating the constants of our perception and behavior. Hennig's works project meaning. Listeners can usually follow what happens in the notes, which takes place on a quite accessible level.

In 1986 Gerhard Muller-Hornbach formulated his aesthetic credo as follows: "I view my music as an integral component of my life. My occupation with music in general, and the act of composition in particular, have increasingly become a personal need, a primary form of vital expression. My dealings with music unlock very special insights and experiences in my encounters with the inner and outer worlds. These insights and experiences combine with the wealth of impressions from other areas of my life to produce a holistic unity of world experiences. They inform and cultivate my personal view of the world. The act of composition is the zenith at which all aspects of this world view merge, intermingle, and coalesce into a unity, which takes shape in the work of music and becomes its meaning."

Denhoff's diverse "settings" transmute artistic expression from one medium to another. It is these intermediate realms between the arts which he exploits, the expressive possibilities of associations and translations. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in his cycle "Traumbuch eines Gefangenen" (Dream Book of a Prisoner), after texts by Horst Bienek. The subtitle alone - "oratorical scenes" - suggests an historical ambience which underscores the work's scope. For death, torture and imprisonment are part of past and present reality.

The unique blend of Stephan Winkler's music and the images of the video artist Jesko Marx results in one of the first DualDiscs on the European continent! The DualDisc, an enhancement and improvement over the DVD plus, combines both audio CD and DVD on one disc. "I consider myself successful when I manage, despite my self-criticism, to write or record music that I myself love to hear." (Stephan Winkler) The present CD contains three works in which the diverse stylistic strands of Winkler's music are brought together in a different way each. "Gullinkambi" for 11 wind instruments forms a sort of habitat in which musical "creatures" collide to generate an evolutionary formal process. "Vom Durst nach Dasein" (Of the Thirst for Existence) for viola and instrumental ensemble is devoted to "attachment to the world," with a distancing commentary in the form of a concluding speech: a text by Robert Musil transformed into music. Finally, our CD rendition of the score of "Zigzag", for six saxophones, bursts the bounds of the medium: on the DVD side of this new DualDisc, the sextet unites with images from the video artist Jesko Marx to create "Zigzag: Pi mal R Quadrat" (Zigzag: π ∙ r²)- music which has really been written for DVD.

Kurt Schwitters (b. 1887) was an exceptionally gifted reciter and lecturer - although less as someone who forms language than as someone who deforms it. As an artist-clown, the bourgeois Schwitters was capable of giving free rein to his anarchistic and chaotic tendencies. Tearing, bending, covering, overpainting: what Schwitters said about his "Merz painting" can be applied as a deforming and deformulating in the poems published during the same period, among others the "Ursonate". As a performing artist he took the goals of the modern architect, "light, air, and sun," and added another, laughter: "Merz is the smile at the graveside and the seriousness at amusing events." The members of the ensemble Die Schwindlinge (founded in 1985) have, above all, presented programs with Kurt Schwitters and hits of the 1920s to 1940s.

Annette Schlunz thinks, feels and lives in notes and sounds. She regards music as a "non-verbal language" that allows her to express thoughts on many concrete levels of meaning. Each new day - with its moods, encounters, stimuli, smells, even the vagaries of its weather - generates its own creative ambience. A rigorous self-control has led her to adopt to an increasing asceticism of timbre and abstention in her material, until she has come to write only what is essential and fervent enough to resound. Nevertheless, her compositions tend to be governed by the female principle of organic metamorphosis and transformation.

In all three pieces presented on this record, the ear notices less the stable ground of tradition and more a shifting terrain of the past destabilized by various techniques of fragmentation and recombination. "The shredding of customary appearances, dismemberment to the point of excess, and - almost from what has been omitted - finally the truth of the musical language comes to light, a language that really has something to say: not the exposition of an organism, not tones that only refer to each other, but the emotion and the protest that live together in the affirmation of what has been lost." Anton Plate Gerda Kosbahn: soprano / J�nos Gallay-Vigh: horn / Godfried Hoogeveen, Barbara Miller, Ludwig D�ll: violoncello / Jerzy Mallek: piano / Theo Altmeyer: tenor / Wolfram Dietrich: piano / Georg W�bbelt: bass drum / Bernhard Hartog, Ronald Hoogeveen, Edward Zienkowsky, Gerda Kosbahn: soprano / J�nos Gallay-Vigh: horn / Godfried Hoogeveen, Barbara Miller, Ludwig D�ll: violoncello / Jerzy Mallek: piano / Theo Altmeyer: tenor / Wolfram Dietrich: piano / Georg W�bbelt: bass drum / Bernhard Hartog, Ronald Hoogeveen, Edward Zienkowsky, Walter Martin Br�nig: violin / Martin Straakholder, Peter Schulz: viola / Ulf Tischbirek, Rainer Bartke: violoncello / Manfred G�nther, J�rgen Malecki: double-bass / Anton Plate: conductor / Gunilde Kramer: piano / Yukiko Sugarawa: piano / Roswitha Trexler: soprano / David Symers, Beate Zelinsky: clarinet / Carlos A. Crespo: horn / Alan Kirkendall: trumpet / Christian Roderburg: percussion / Henry Kreuter, Petra M�llejans, Claudia Beil: violin / Walter K�ssner: viola / Herrmann Backes, Jane Salmon: violoncello / Joachim Tirler: double-bass / Wolfgang Trommer: conductor.

The versatility of the composer Georg Katzer documented this CD. The "Open Landscape with obbligato tone e", a one-movement orchestral piece leads, consistently before tensions; she does not cease to always create new sources of conflict. The play "come and go" is the result of productive interaction between the wind association Berlin (wind quintet and piano) and composer. Katzer spent here it's specially developed "modes technique" which allows sounds that is beyond the scope closely layered chords and allows a wealth of nuances. "Imaginary dialogue 4 'breathing' 'is an interplay between the breathing players, his tone (bass clarinet) and what returns from the speaker and strikes back at the starting point of the noise and tone. The "String Quartet no. 3" in 1988 premiered by the Arditti String Quartet is full of diversity and the fissures of the quartet sound, as we know it since Anton Webern's Op. 5. The piece bears - so Katzer - traces the ups and downs of subjective moods. And finally "De Musica" can be interpreted as a biting musical treatise that will teach to adopt a critical attitude in sovereign affairs of the music.

Since 1980 Babette Koblenz has been analyzing and transcribing non-European music, jazz, rock and pop, as well as acquainting herself with eastern thought, mysticism, and the cabbala, particularly in it's medieval Spanish form. She has composed a series of non-notated (or only later notated) songs and instrumental pieces, but at the same time - "as a result of sometimes irreconcilable difficulties" - she also produced precisely written-out scores. In 1984 she began to put together her own ensemble for the performance and production of her songs.

Lyrical sensitivity, ironic expose, ardent commitment and bitter sarcasm: these are motivation axioms which the Dresden composer Wilfried Kratzschmar discovered for his artistic work. Raised in a no-man's-land between nonconformist parents and doctrinaire teachers, he confronted the prevailing political and artistic pressures of the time with a creative urge of unflinching openness, uniting a fascinating and purposefully cultivated timbral imagination with a sharpness of metaphor that all-too often provoked extremely divergent reactions from his listeners. Kratzschmar's second symphony "Explosionen und Cantus" brought him at a stroke into the glare of widespread publicity. It was applauded by listeners and critics alike for its surprisingly accessible and yet emotionally rending synthesis of the familiar and the new.

For Acoustic Art, all of the audible events are components of equal value. Acoustic Art is a melting pot of heterogeneous acoustic elements. Acoustic Art: a world of language and a world of sounds and noises from the acoustic environment. A language that tends toward sounds, to the sound of language and to music, the all-sound of notes. As a new genre of the electronic age, like film, Acoustic Art developed its own language. Like filmmakers, audio artists have also blurred the distinction between author and director: they usually realize their pieces themselves. "riverrun" - the title of the two sound montages of this CD edition, with excerpts from a few of the many productions by the "Studio of Acoustic Art", cites the first word of the multilingual sound poetry of "Finnegans Wake" by James Joyce, a work whose end leads back to its beginning and which the Irish writer described as "soundsense". Soundsense is also a key to Ars Acustica. The sound quotations selected here give something of the inexhaustible richness of this art. Its language is a language of many languages whose wandering alphabet is open to everything audible. In "Voicings", the first sound montage, the wide-ranging, expressive organ of the human voice forms the acoustic panorama: beginning with quotations of the beginnings of language, first articulations, prelinguistic sounds and word formations, multilingual sequences, and language as a testimony in which history presents itself as a series of sorrowful conflicts. These are meditative compositions for voice that range from an evocation to memory to an evocative hint of cultures rich in tradition. "Soundscapes", the second sound montage, is a journey through works that are mostly not tied to language, through real or imaginary soundscapes, through sound compositions of the Studio's Metropolis series, in which international artists have sketched audio visions, and even the "Topography of a SoundMind".

"Dokumentaroper" is one of Helmut Oehring's works, where he integrates deaf persons. Helmut Oehring writes in the liner notes: "All of my pieces are docudramas. They hinge on the problem of why people have language and interpersonal relations at all. My music is also a response to a deficiency, a substitute for things found wanting, the filling of an empty space, the pinning down of things loose and detached. My mother tongue was sign language. It was not until I was four-and-a-half that I learned the language of speech. My parents were both deaf from birth. In the meantime writing music has become of existential importance to me."