Pfeifenspiel was composed for the two pipe organs in the church Sankt Peter in Cologne. Together, they form a huge instrument with more than 100 stops and many highly usual timbres normally only found in a theatre organ. For more details (in German) see de.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Peter_(Köln)#Orgeln

The playback of the pipe organ is MIDI controlled in this performance. Unfortunately, the spatial interplay between the two organs is somewhat lost in this stereo recording.

This piece was commissioned by Initiative Musik und Informatik Köln for the Symposium COMPUTING MUSIC VIII.

Pfeifenspiel (2012)

Composed for the conference "All About Cinderella: retellings in a cultural imagination" (2017, University of Bedfordshire).

Flute: Riana Walsh

Aschenputtel Movement 4

Aschenputtel Movement 3

Aschenputtel Movement 2

This composition fuses South Asian (Karnatic) rhythmic techniques with Western concepts of harmony and form.

Verflochtene Tänze for Cello-Campanula and Akkordeon, MIDI Mockup (2023)

8 channel sound installation. Commissioned by Design Zentrum Thüringen.

Two opposite walls of a small room are screens shining in intensive light of slowly changing color. The room is filled with a single, incredible low voice-like tone changing slowly in its "color" too. The light part of the installation was designed by Andre Reutter and Wolfgang Sattler.

Sound material: instrument consisting of a VCO (by Hans Mikelson) which is filtered by a bank of resonating filters enforcing formants and further processed. The instrument is controlled by a turning cycloid.

This uploaded version is a stereo reduction that also slightly reduced the pitch content due to the missing spatialisation.

Farbklang (1999), reduced to stereo

I composed Tempziner Modulationen for a concert titled Carrillo versus Fokker, and indeed both the 31-tone Fokker organ and the 96-tone Carrillo piano are employed. The concert title sounds like a contest – Fokker clearly won in my piece :) I freely admit that I find the 31-tone equal temperament more attractive than 96-tone equal temperament (it convincingly approximates just intervals beyond 5-limit without introducing too many tones), and so the piano is only playing tones that approximate tones of the Fokker organ.

Concerning the title, I finalised the piece in a tiny village in Northern Germany called Tempzin. Each of the three movements somehow includes modulations in the sense that an underlying root (e.g., the root of an underlying scale) changes, but these changes are somewhat "smeared out". While the notion of modulation is of course highly conventional, none of the modulations in this piece are standard practice (e.g., I never use a diatonic scale).

Tempziner Modulationen (2011), Movement 3

Tempziner Modulationen (2011), Movement 2

Tempziner Modulationen (2011), Movement 1

8 channel sound installation. Commissioned by Design Zentrum Thüringen.

Two opposite walls of a small room are screens shining in intensive light of slowly changing color. The room is filled with a single, incredible low voice-like tone changing slowly in its "color" too. The light part of the installation was designed by Andre Reutter and Wolfgang Sattler.

Sound material: instrument consisting of a VCO (by Hans Mikelson) which is filtered by a bank of resonating filters enforcing formants and further processed. The instrument is controlled by a turning cycloid.

Torsten Anders

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