Armin Schibler, Klaus Huber

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Two Swiss composers of strikingly different temperaments and political urgencies, gathered under the "Profile Schweizer Musik" series that Da Camera Magna dedicated to documenting the country's post-war compositional achievement. Armin Schibler (1920-1986) and Klaus Huber (1924-2017) represent successive and increasingly radicalized engagements with the European modernist tradition - Schibler working from a neo-expressionist base formed by Hindemith and Bartók, Huber from a position that grew steadily more confrontational with the social conditions of musical production itself.

Huber, who would go on to become one of the most important figures in late twentieth-century composition, had by this point already begun to develop the distinctive combination of microtonality, extended technique, and explicit political content that defines his mature work - music that refused to operate as pure aesthetic object and insisted on situating itself within the social world it inhabited. His studies with Willy Burkhard and Boris Blacher, and his long association with Freiburg im Breisgau's Hochschule für Musik, gave him a formation as rigorous as it was unconventional. Against this, Schibler's somewhat more contained language offers a productive counterpoint - two voices in dialogue across the full spectrum of what Swiss contemporary music was capable of producing. Da Camera Magna, SM 94040.