Aeris is a string quartet whose sound language is shaped by subtle expansions of the instrumental spectrum. Singing bowls form the starting point of the work – their reverberations are picked up and transformed to create a fragile, floating structure. The performers use techniques such as harmonics, sul tasto, and sul ponticello to produce finely tuned tonal transitions and shimmering textures. The piece explores the fragility of sound and the interplay between resonance and silence, with the airy character of the composition creating an ephemeral yet intense sound space.

(Kathrin A. Denner)

Kathrin A. Denner (*1986) studied trumpet, music theory, and composition with Theo Brandmüller, Wolfgang Rihm, and Johannes Schöllhorn at the music conservatories in Saarbrücken, Karlsruhe, and Freiburg. Since 2024, she has been pursuing a doctorate at the Collège Doctoral Européen d’Interprétation et de Création Musicales GLAREAN, focusing on time in contemporary music and dance.

Her compositions arise from a playful, almost childlike curiosity in working with musical material. This material is deconstructed, filleted, examined, and reassembled – sometimes precisely, sometimes transformed. The focus is on exploring its properties, its behavior, and its reactions to changes. It is about the concentrated action of the material: the conscious decision for gestures, forms, or structures and their precise, radical processing.

She has won numerous awards, including the German Music Competition, and has been honored with the Heidelberger Künstlerinnenpreis and the German Music Authors’ Prize from GEMA, and has received working scholarships from the Deutsche Akademie Rom, Herrenhaus Edenkoben, Villa Concordia, and the Künstlerstadt Kalbe.

For the concerns of composers, she is actively involved as a board member and in the leadership team of the E-Music section of the German Composers’ Association and as a delegate for the extraordinary members of GEMA. She is a passionate lecturer at the Trossingen University of Music.

Memories of a Stone Sitting under the Skin of the Water on the Lake There is an image on the horizon of my memory that evaporates, like a stone lying beneath the rippling surface of the water on the lake. The shape of the stone changes and distorts, dissolving into pixels as the water stretches and transforms. With every distortion, the stone vanishes in the memory of time, like a body in exile, oppressed by the vast seas between lands, and becomes pixels of its cells in the memory of all souls.

This piece is about restoring that evaporated memory by repeating its pixels in the four corners of the quartet. It places ornamentation (pixels) at the centre of the music, presenting rhythm as a “phenomenon of bodily movement,” and explores the perception of time among the musicians through the experience of multiple timelines that unfold and fold within a fabric woven from ornaments.

(Bahar Royaee)

Bahar Royaee (*1990 in Iran) works as a music educator and composer/sound designer in the fields of concert music and various media arts. Her music is described as captivating, full of ideas and colours, and as a “poetic invocation.”

She studied with Suzanne Farrin and Jason Eckardt, is currently pursuing a PhD in composition at the City University of New York, and is a lecturer at Baruch College and Artist-in-Residence at the Longy School of Music. Bahar’s works were performed at the Time:Spans Festival in 2020, the Fromm Foundation Composer Conference, and at the Tehran Electroacoustic Music Festival in 2022. She has received awards such as the Pnea Award, the Roger Session Memorial Composition Award, and the Korourian Electroacoustic Music Award.

All creatures decay into tiny bones.

By the time of Revival,

A Reborn of a new creature,

From the tiny bones.

In my poem, I distill the essence of the music – a journey of transformation and rebirth. The piece unfolds in reverse order, tracing the reformation of life from fragile remains to vibrant, fleshy vitality. Through an organic exploration of the physicality and texture of sound, the performers channel raw energy and establish a strong connection with the audience. The dramatic and immersive experience celebrates the beauty of creation and transformation.

(Zihan Wu)

Zihan Wu (*2001) is a Chinese composer and pianist. Her interest lies in exploring the interrelationships between different colours, objects, time, and space, which she weaves into a unique and personal sound world. In doing so, she creates refined and imaginative soundscapes. The poetic, dramatic, and organic energy flows that naturally connect the composition itself with the performers and the audience are essential to her works. Born in Fuzhou and raised in Shanghai, China, she began composing at the age of 11. Zihan is currently based in the United States, where she is pursuing her Master of Music in Composition at the Yale School of Music. Prior to this, she graduated from the Music Middle School affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition and Piano from the Eastman School of Music. Her work After Infinity won 1st Prize at the 10th International Matan-Givol Composition Competition.

The work on tremblement began with the idea of extremely slowing down a string quartet by Brahms – like a tape playing far too slowly. Every detail of the piece, including the vibrato, was to be massively enlarged and, though still directly connected to the original, grotesquely distorted. With the first concrete drafts, it became clear that I couldn’t use Brahms’ material the same way I had in comparable pieces. This may be due to the familiarity of the material, but perhaps more so because of its formal completeness. To maintain the idea of a direct connection to Brahms’ music, I had to find ways to make it work in a space that was far more abstract than I had planned. Through these structural and sonic decisions, the piece evolved in many ways into the opposite of its original idea. Instead of an extreme slowing down, many tempos are so fast that they need to be adjusted for real performance. And although every single note of the piece refers to a specific place in the first movement of Brahms’ string quartet Op. 51, No. 2, this connection is barely recognizable over long stretches.

The title tremblement, originally a reference to Édouard Glissant, gradually became a metaphor for all sorts of trembling movements, many of which are very concrete and direct, sometimes even violent. The piece has become a battleground of extremely conflicting forces, meeting in a structurally claustrophobic space.

(Sebastian Claren)

Sebastian Claren (*1965 in Mannheim) studied composition, musicology, philosophy, and art history in Heidelberg, Berlin, and Freiburg. He is a professor of composition at Seoul National University. In his compositional work, Sebastian Claren draws inspiration from the precision of electronic music and the sound sensitivity of pop music, applying these qualities to instrumental and vocal scores. His earlier works were meticulous constructions based on reduced material, with minimal references to external sources. Today, he takes the opposite approach: his work is based on clear references to already existing music, whose expression and character he manipulates through structural and gestural interventions. His music derives its expressiveness from the internal tension between clear formal structure and obsessive focus on detail.

The Frankfurt Fabrik Quartet is characterised by its committed, fresh and bold interpretation of contemporary music. The four members met in 2021 as part of the International Ensemble Modern Academy in Frankfurt am Main. The quartet was one of three ensembles selected for the ‘InSzene’ programme via the German Music Council’s Podium Gegenwart and is currently part of the string quartet programme funded by the international platform MERITA. The Fabrik Quartet’s work centres on collaborations with contemporary composers such as Rebecca Saunders, Alberto Posadas, Liza Lim, George Lewis, Jörg Widmann, Jose Manuel López López, Walter ZImmermann and Ulrich Kreppein coached and pieces with Jose Luis Escrivà, Kathrin Denner, Rishin Singh and Esther Pérez Soriano. Since its foundation, the Fabrik Quartet has received important international prizes, including at the Anton Rubinstein International Chamber Music Competition, the Third International Competition for Contemporary Music Re_Crea in Castelló, Spain and the John Cage Award in Halberstadt, Germany.

Since October 2024, the Fabrik Quartet has been studying at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts with Lucas Fels (Arditti Quartet) and Tim Vogler (Vogler Quartet).