Orchestra

Premiered by Lietzeorchester, Berlin, at Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche July 2025.
I turned sixty last year and thought it was about time I took on the orchestra. I had been looking for a way to tackle this format for a long time. Since, as a visual artist, I lack the compositional tools for harmonization and orchestration, it made sense to work with a ready-made material. My music is always about observing processes. The source material is arbitrary, as it has no intrinsic aesthetic value. So the focus is not on the sound as such, but rather on the processes conducted within the sound. The selection of the material follows pragmatic criteria: it must be suitable for carrying out the corresponding processes.  
I have developed a form type for this, which I call 'column form'. The 'column' is formed by a single bar cut out of an orchestral piece of my choice. The process consists of shifting the individual instrumental parts against each other from bar to bar according to a certain formula, so that each time new harmonies and timbres are created.

Beethoven Square

Nikolaus Gerszewski is a trained visual artist and self-trained composer of experimental music, born 1964 in Hamburg, currently living in Budapest, Hungary, where he has been teaching experimental soundproduction at the university of fine arts, since 2014. 

"The term ‘experimental music‘ means to my understanding, music that results from an experimental arrangement. The notation follows a procedure model, which substitutes the compositional decision making process. Depending on the listener’s mindset the sounding result may be found intersting or boring, beautiful or annoying. I have never been very much interested in sound as such, or even beauty as such, whatever that means. The sound of music is the trace of a thought process, and all that matters, is that the idea takes shape as clearly as possible." Since 2021 Nikolaus is a member of the composer's collective Frog Peak Music