Pioneers of electronic music: Using the organ, the Zurich composer Katharina Rosenberger explores the boundaries of the audible, designing a subtle sound architecture. The Frenchwoman Eliane Radigue created a wide-sounding island in which you can lose yourself.

Two wide-ranging compositions can be heard this evening. One of them—a world premiere—takes its cue from the organ, the extraordinary vibration of which fascinates Katharina Rosenberger.

«So the keynote vanishes from our hearing when playing the 32-‘labial register’. What remains is a deep murmuring, but toneless vibration that draws over the soles of the feet, through the limbs and through the body.» This is how the composer, who currently teaches at the University of San Diego, describes it, «I allow all these facets to be incorporated. In close cooperation with the organist Daniel Glaus, we explore the boundaries of the audible, we deconstruct the spectra of individual sounds or sound combinations and provoke harmonies and sound textures by special register combinations. The sound architecture is differentiated by the electronics and supported spatially. Loudspeakers distributed in the audience area subtly emphasize the diffusion of individual partial tones or intensify the perception of difference tones and additive sound synthesis.»

Before midnight, we meet Eliane Radigue, a pioneer of electronic music. For a long time—like so many women in electronic music—she was considered an «insider tip». Already early on, she developed fascinating, broad sound surfaces, for example in «L’île re-sonante», which would hardly have been possible with conventional instruments.