To be released on various streaming platforms on June 9, 2025

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Nocturne
for flutes and vocal sounds

We're all familiar with this: „You could / should / ought to . . . “
Some people keep special books, in which they collect sketches and drafts of these ideas – often enough leaving them there, because elaboration inevitably takes time and energy, both of which are limited.

So it happened initially to this piece.

I can't remember exactly when I had the idea of composing a flute piece based on Christian Morgenstern's poem Fisches Nachtgesang – probably sometime in the 1990s.
For recorder it was supposed to be.

My idea was to create a set of flute fingerings based on the symbols ◡ and ― used in the poem with the help of the I Ching and Morse code symbol systems. I had tried them out on various recorders at home, and I was quite satisfied with the sound. But these instruments were built in German fingering, and not in the common professional baroque fingering!

In 2011, I went back to the folder with the handwritten notes and tabulatures. I decided to make the previously abandoned work the starting point for a version for transverse flute. The result was an almost complete handwritten notation of instrumental and vocal sounds.

In other projects I had already started to take the sonic realization of my pieces into my own hands by means of my digital audio workstation and professional sound databases. After the release of Über Wasser, TageJahreLeben and especially einander, the time had finally come (2025) to pull out the folder one more time and bring the work on the flute piece to a good end.

Morgenstern's poem is more of a starting point for the present version than a text to be set to music, which is why the piece now bears the title Nocturne. The original instrument, the recorder, has become an extensive ensemble of flute sounds, extended by vocal and speech sounds from my own voice.

Yet the „listening view“ of Fisches Nachtgesang has not been lost: Large spaces are opened up acoustically, the sound carries far - as if under water - and invites for meditation. It is a kind of dream music in which the familiar appears enigmatically from afar.


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