Pieces for Ensemble

Arnulf Herrmann’s music, which was recorded by the Ensemble Modern for this Super Audio CD (contains both stereo and 5.1 versions) draws its 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.