St. Augustine advised his coevals to seek the truth in the "inner man." Such inwardness seems far removed from the reality of life in the twenty-first century. Perhaps that is why a tendency to focus on internal processes has emerged in the music of the last few decades-not in the sense of a new subjectivity, in which sentimental private matters are put on display, but rather in the sense of an exploratory introspection: It's a question of increasing the intensity. Mark Andre seeks existential sonic situations on his path "toward the inside" (nach innen, to quote the fully written-out title of his piece "ni"). Like Andre, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has also delved into the internal nature of sound. Her music originates in the rich variety of spectral harmonies, and it sets itself the task of telling a very old story in a new way: a violin concerto as the legend of the grail. An entirely different aspect of inner life manifests itself in Ian Willcock's piece. He visits the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, on his deathbed. At the start of the twentieth century, Freud's glimpses of the "inside" showed that there is more to be found there than the truth: the phantasm.

Renato de Grandis's forty-eight Preludi per Pianoforte were composed several years after the composer decided, shortly after his 60th birthday, to stop composing. After living in Germany and Belgium for thirty years, building a reputation as one of the major composers in Europe's avant-garde music scene, de Grandis decided to move back to Italy to go on retreat. His withdrawal from composing lasted only a few years, however; it appears travelling led him back to music. Considered as a whole, one finds in the Preludes the entire spectrum of de Grandis's musical thought.

Mark Andre's music is introverted and fragile, but it speaks to the listener with a shy intensity: hij! This is the title given by the German-French composer to a pair of pieces recorded for this album by the cr�me de la cr�me of avant-garde music ensembles: the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne conducted by Mariano Chiacchiarini as well as the SWR Vocal Ensemble and Experimental Studio with conductor Marcus Creed and sound director Joachim Haas. The music on this album is characterized by the unique nature of it's sounds. It sensitizes our ears to the tiniest nuances and creates mesmerizing fields of tension on the borders between sound and silence. Intricate and subtly transformed contrapuntal structures weave their way through hij 1 (for orchestra) like bewitching sound shadows searching for resonance, a resonance which becomes the point of departure for hij 2 (for vocal ensemble and electronics). This music is absolutely contemporary, yet it embraces the inherited musical tradition in a completely authentic and unpretentious manner. It slips stealthily into our consciousness and vanishes just as mysteriously.

China Meets Europe is the second in Wergo's series of ten recordings of the music of Enjott Schneider. Schneider is a German composer, musicologist and music educator. He is known for his film work, having won the Bavarian Film Award in 1990, the Filmband in Gold in 1991, and the Deutscher Fernsehpreis in 2007. China's rich culture has fascinated Schneider for a long time. This recording presents two works which, though they owe their sound primarily to western symphonic ideas, also incorporate spiritual and musical influences from the East.

German contemporary composer Gerhard St�bler studied with Nicolaus Huber (composition) and Gerd Zacher (organ) at the Nordwestdeutsche Musikakademie in Detmold and the Folkwang-Hochschule in Essen. Winning the 1982 Cornelius Cardew Memorial Prize was the first in a series of accolades he has received as a composer. St�bler's music often transcends the conventional framework. His catalogue of works contains only five pieces for organ, all of which are recorded here by Dominik Susteck.

This recording consists of three of my early compositions produced at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. The first two of them, especially "Dreamsong", became very well-known and influential in the filed of electroacoustic music and have received many honors. In those early days of computer music my colleagues and I were pioneering the development and use of many of the techniques of digital synthesis, recording, and sound processing that are now commonplace. Due to the almost fanatical emphasis on sound quality that was then a part of the CCRMA atmosphere, these works continue to stand on a par with the best that current instruments can produce. I hope that you will experience some of the excitement and inspiration that I felt in bringing this unusual music to life. (Michael McNabb)

"What I'm interested in is a compositional process and a sounding music that are one and the same thing"(Steve Reich, 1968). Minimal music, which numbers Steve Reich among its founders and as one of its most significant representatives, existed for hardly more than ten years. The Ensemble Avantgarde presents a wonderful survey of Reich's minimal music-compositions. The conceptional concentration in the musical work on the structurally simple means of its creation is seen especially in Reich's "Pendulum Music", which is presented here in three different versions. Strict minimal music ended with "Phase Patterns" of 1970. The Ensemble Avantgarde is an association of musicians in Leipzig who are dedicated to the performance of 20th-century music. Since its founding in 1989, the ensemble has worked with a variable membership under the artistic and organizational direction of Steffen Schleiermacher. Concert tours have taken the group through many European countries, East Asia, and South America. Numerous radio productions and CDs document the work of the ensemble. They have been specially recognized through a grant from the Ernst von Siemens Foundation and the Schneider-Schott Prize given by the city of Mainz.

Hans Werner Henze called the opera of Pollicino and Clotide that he wrote in his adopted homeland of Italy, based on the tale of Tom Thumb as told by Collodi, a "fairy tale for music," and dedicated it to the children of Montepulciano. The opera deals with matters of life and death, difficult relationships between parents and children, poverty and hunger, staying in and being freed from inhuman conditions. The little hero, Pollicino (Italian: "little thumb"), and his six brothers who have to seek for shelter in the house of Orco, the maneater (whose daughters are Clotilde and her six sisters), because poverty drove them away from home, have to go through several adventures before they all together manage to turn their fate for the better. First recording with extensive booklet and German-English libretto.

Harry PARTCH (1901-1974), one of the greatest and most individualistic composers of all time, who created dozens of incredible instruments for the performance of his music, created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century. Closely connected with his name is NEWBAND, an ensemble founded by Dean Drummond, which received custodianship of the original Harry PARTCH Instrument Collection in 1990 and has since been involved with resurrecting PARTCH's great works.

In the early 1960s, Wergo launched a series that would become legendary in the history of contemporary music recordings. Studio Reihe Neuer Musik featured some of the most significant and cutting-edge compositions of the modern era. These highlights of 20th-century music history have lost nothing of their topicality or liveliness. Many of the recordings in the series have never been released on CD and some have been unavailable in any form for many years. This release, featuring Arnold Schoenberg's sprechstimme monodrama Erwartung, is possibly the most famous Studio Reihe title. Soprano Helga Pilarczyk is accompanied by the great conductor Hermann Scherchen in a riveting performance of one of the most important and influential works of the 20th century.

More than 50 composers from 13 different countries contributed to this collection of music with computers. Their pieces represent major directions of how avantgarde composers utilize the potential of new technology. Savouret, Alain / Lindwall, Christer / Oppenheim, Daniel V.

Bego�a Uriarte of Spain and Karl-Hermann Mrongovius of Munich, where he is professor for piano at the Hochschule f�r Musik, form together a piano duo which has won international prizes and which avoids every kind of flashy publicity. For years they were an insider's secret among connoisseurs and music journalists, but their infrequent performances nevertheless became special events. Thus, the "S�ddeutsche Zeitung" wrote in autumn 1998: "The standing ovations in the Prinzregenten theater prove it: this Basque-Bavarian piano coalition is a pianistic institution that demands all the respect of the competition... it belongs in the major leagues of the piano duos of international reputation... quite simply splendidly performed." The concert tour through Germany together with the four composers represented on this CD already was a big success and thus let the plan for this recording arise. Lacking a programmatic background, Josep Soler's "Coronaci�n de espinas" (Crowning with thorns) is part of a series of works with biblical or mythological motifs that derive from an archetypal abstraction. "Nuevas Polifon�as" reflects Ram�n Barce's consideration of the problems of Gestalt psychology and the utopia of objective form in art. "Flamenco" by Joan Guinjoan forms a triptych with sound elements from Andalusian folk songs which reflects the balance between an intuitive creativity and a rigorous exploration that oversteps traditional limits of sound, rhythm, expressive intensity, instrumental possibilities, and the ability to hear. The fandango in it's multiple variations, the Portuguese fado, and the archetypal tango from Argentina have a virtual presence in Tom�s Marcos "Fandangos, Fados y Tangos". In his "Glasperlenspiel" (Glass bead game) the overcoming of time with a reduced set of basic materials is achieved by the use of minimal variations that thread the motifs together like pearls on a string. Musical creativity involves a great deal of play, but it is creative play that is able to penetrate into the realm of sensibility and intelligence (Tom�s Marco).

The Japanese composer Keiko Harada "is a rarity among modern composers inasmuch as she accepts the great 'mystery', the movement of her own soul, as the wellspring of her creativity. It seems as if her ear can discern the sound in which a leaf lives, the sound that a drop of water sends out to the universe. A mysterious power is at work here, a power that listens and imagines, builds impressions into solid forms, works them into musical notation, and gets musicians to perform scores they swore could never be performed." (Ayumu Yasutomi) "F-fragments" for accordion and piano was composed in 2012, as Japan's third major incident of radioactive contamination continued to unfold. The composition, composed during the worst crisis in postwar Japan, takes as it's motif the tension between the energy of the human body and the radioactivity and harassment that are destroying it. "Book I" is the ambitious realization of a compositional concept, in which the internal condition of the performer is composed at the moment of performance. Each of the four movements has a different character, and each demands that the performer take on a different character. The performer has to employ his every technique and completely open his five senses. Making reference to Johann Sebastian Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier", Harada's work "Nach Bach" consists of 24 pieces each of which takes the music of Bach as it wells up from the abyss and weaves it into an incandescent tapestry. Like a radiant body, the sound that pours forth from the piano frolics, laughs, prays, and finally returns to it's source, the cosmos. The present CD contains seven selected pieces from this composition.

This CD with dances from four centuries are edited by Karl Heinz Taubert who is sure: "Dancing has the power to change the persons as well as place and time!" Besides the entertainment effect the CD is meant to accompany the practicing of historical dances. The extensive liner notes in the CD booklet are presented in German.

On the occasion of Wilhelm Killmayer's 75th birthday, in August 2002, WERGO publishes a collection of the works for piano solo by the Munich composer. These works, written between 1975 and 1999, were enregistered by Siegfried Mauser in close co-operation with his former teacher, the multiple-prize-winning composer Wilhelm Killmayer.