Nikolaus Brass

It is the eternal questions that Nikolaus Brass mainly concerns himself with in his compositional work: the question of existence, of being, and first and foremost of all possible intermediate stages at the edge of what is conceivable, of what can just be grasped. In VOID (1999) he investigates the feeling left by loss, "structural empty spaces that bear the construction of sound while challenging it at the same time." For a due (2003), Brass has borrowed short captions from Yashushi Inoue's novel My mother; the last part is entitled memoria – "in 'commemoration' and 'consideration' of the speaking speechlessness of music." In TRIO (1987-1991) he works with fragmented shapes that spread through space, splitting the "progression of time" into "states of 'still now – then not anymore'." "The composition is divided into two parts. In the second part, all tendencies towards a dissolution of boundaries revealed in the first part are developed. Ever and again, this creates an experience of 'time standing still' in hermetic musical spaces, congealed from the energy of the musical figures and momentums exposed at the beginning." (Nikolaus Brass)