Nikolaus Brass

A Darmstadt composer and student of Lachenmann, Brass employs the vocabulary a contemporary composer of the middle-European avant garde, in two extended works which continuously ebb and flow, streams of musical consciousness with an apparent, though mysterious, narrative; a sense of unwillingness to be silenced, as though the event of the moment must be preserved at all cost. Microtonal and with much employment of extended harmonics, the music frequently has an unstable, shifting quality, though from time to time unexpected anchor-points of rhythmic insistence or block chords emerge, and occasionally what sounds like a distant memory of archaic melody, suggesting a relationship to more conventional quartet writing. Brass’ infrequent tuttis are dense of texture, while especially in the second quartet, delicate wisps of material predominate, ethereal and ambiguous.