Jürg Frey
Jürg Frey (b. 1953 in Aarau, Switzerland) studied in Zurich and Geneva where he graduated with a concert diploma in clarinet under Thomas Friedli. He was co-founder of the Lenzburg Music Forum, and has been artistic director of the Aarau concert series 'Moments Musicaux' for more than ten years. In 1991 he was prize winner at the Boswil International Composition Seminar. He was awarded a sabbatical year (1986 and 1996) and received financial assistance for his stay in Berlin by the Canton of Aargau. Since 1993 he's been associated with the Wandelweiser group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance, recording and publication of their own music.
Jürg Frey (b. 1953 in Aarau, Switzerland) studied in Zurich and Geneva where he graduated with a concert diploma in clarinet under Thomas Friedli. He was co-founder of the Lenzburg Music Forum, and has been artistic director of the Aarau concert series 'Moments Musicaux' for more than ten years. In 1991 he was prize winner at the Boswil International Composition Seminar. He was awarded a sabbatical year (1986 and 1996) and received financial assistance for his stay in Berlin by the Canton of Aargau. Since 1993 he's been associated with the Wandelweiser group, a collective of composer/performers dedicated to the performance, recording and publication of their own music.
Echo.Trio.Fragile.Eyot.
**300 copies** "Taken together, these works not only trigger concentrated, deep(er) listening, making a great case for the importance of silence as a decisive and structural element, but they also stress that the line between a composition and an installation is an imaginary one, or at least much more fluid than one might think." - Guy Peters"Four remarkable avant-garde recordings, two of which document sound installations – gently inspiring." - Kevin Press, The Moderns"I easily admit I don’t kn…
120 Pieces of Sound
Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming me…
Early To Late
Early to Late presents an inspired commission for Magnus Granberg and Jürg Frey, inviting each to compose for Ensemble Grizzana using the same brief: build a new work from Renaissance fragments. Granberg’s “How Vain Are All Our Frail Delights?” draws on William Byrd’s choral music, transforming melodic kernels into shimmering, spectral textures. Ensemble voices - celesta, glass harp, dulcimer, violin, winds - float through cycles of open-form improvisation and carefully weighted silence. The res…
Collection Gustave Roud
Collection Gustave Roud is a double album presenting five quietly radiant works by Swiss composer Jürg Frey, each created in dialogue with the poet and photographer Gustave Roud. The pieces - realized by a remarkable ensemble including Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh, Regula Konrad, and others - parse the space between nature and imagination, fragment and wholeness. Frey’s music is intimately bound to Roud’s texts, which trace the passing of seasons, the mystery of the Haut-Jorat landsc…
L'âme Est Sans Retenue I
Swiss composer Jürg Frey's six hour long electronic tape piece L'àme Est Sans Retenue I was recorded and assembled in 1997/98 and is now being released for the first time. It is the longest piece Frey has ever composed in his over 40 year career.In this piece, Frey utilized the sounds of field recordings he made in Berlin in 1997 as the source materials, alternately inserted between long stretches of silence. Frey was particularly focusing around that time on how the dynamic relation between sou…
Ephemeral Constructions
University of South Carolina experimental music workshop, Greg Stuart (director). Kallam Ashmore (objects), Brian Bethea (saxophone), Erik Carlson (violin), Eric Dennis (objects), James Easteppe (guitar), Jürg Frey (clarinet), Michael Halbrook (objects), Timothy Hall (guitar), John Kammerer (horn), Aj Karp (objects), Logan Mclean (voice), Lauren Phillips (objects), Brooke Rosenberg (objects), Chris Ruggiero (objects), Jessica Russell (objects), Nikil Sairam (violin), Bailey Seabury (percussion),…
For Clarinet (And Piano)
Clarinet (and Piano) brings together Amsterdam composer Dante Boon and Swiss clarinetist Jürg Frey for three works at the porous boundary of composition and improvisation. In the long opening duo “O’Hare,” Boon’s gentle piano arpeggios glow beside Frey’s quietly expressive clarinet, combining spiraling lyricism with stately stillness across nearly twenty-five minutes. The piece unfolds in a gradual arc, eschewing conventional development for the slow revelation of timbre and intervallic resonanc…
Guitarist Alone
Jurg Frey - guitarist, alone played by Cristian Alvear. A double CD featuring all of Jurg Frey's music for solo guitar, beautifully interpreted by the Chilean guitarist Cristian Alvear, including a new piece written specially for Cristian. “Not one for the impatient listener, this softly entrancing double-disc set contains all the solo guitar music by the Swiss composer Jürg Frey – and that means an awful lot of silence and not a huge number of notes. The first piece, Abendlied, contains exactl…
duos
Since their formation in 1998 at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, duo Contour have commissioned and performed over 40 new pieces by composers from Asia, Europe, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States. Their collaborative work has combined the acoustic world of trumpet and percussion with dance, electronics, improvisation, origami, story-telling, theatre and video, as well as and with other musicians in their 'duo Contour plus….' programmes. The duo has been resident at …
string quartets
Material can be anonymous. Consider, for example, the middle voices in medieval hymn books: unadorned, not artful, a simple handiwork, a leisurely alternation of single notes. It might be a scale, or, beyond music, the stones of a wall, not artfully stacked, but simply and properly, the formal idea being nothing other than that of a wall. When I was working on the String Quartet (1988), I encountered the painting of Agnes Martin. I saw clear-cut forms, not overgrown with rhetoric and figuratio…
Accordion Music
2007 release **
Fold in; fold out: the breathing of the accordion. On this CD the accordion unfolds in a very special way, unusually close to the instrument. Four works, four worlds that seem to know each other; refer to each other like a greeting from far away.Hearing John Cage's ,,Cheap Imitation" played on accordion gives you the impression of folk music from an unknown, probably non-existent country. This music comes from nowhere, goes nowhere, is forever on its way.....Like ,,Sam Lazaro Bro…
Grizzana And Other Pieces 2009-2014
Grizzana features Swiss composer Jürg Frey at his most introspective, realized by Ensemble Grizzana - Frey (clarinet), Mira Benjamin (violin), Richard Craig (flute), Emma Richards (viola), Philip Thomas (piano), Seth Woods (cello), and Ryoko Akama (organ & electronics). The work, together with companion pieces on the double CD Grizzana and Other Pieces 2009-2014(Another Timbre), marks a deep engagement with sonic transparency, tension, and the delicate equilibrium found in Morandi’s painting. Ea…
Songs and piano pieces
music that allows sounds to sound: to die away, completely, into silence sounds thought from their end: not moving forward, but drawing back. this creates space, expanse, a delicate serenity: silence - and what it shelters - becomes audible. this is singing with the ears: barely more than silence. a singing which not only makes, but becomes space: a space for worlds. phrases are also sounds: unfolded, laid out as a path. sound paths that come into being first when followed, invariably trail…
24 Worter
JF: The 24 words are the titles of the individual pieces, and they are at the same time the entire text. They are also a list that shows how the piece gets from a beginning to an end. It is, in a sense, a cycle not simply a collection of pieces - a cycle which begins, makes a journey and ends at a different place. TA: If I had to categorize this list of words, it seems to me they are addressed to quite different areas. Herzeleid (Heartbreak) for example, sounds old-fashioned, Einsamkeitsmangel …
Pianist, Alone
Two fascinating pieces by Jurg Frey on this double CD, beautifully realized by Andy Lee, but fascinating for different reasons. "pianist, alone (1)" lasts for almost 90 minutes and consists of a series of discreet episodes. Will Robin's excellent notes on the site below do a far better job of describing things musicologically than I ever could, so I'll give a few other impressions. The opening chord sequence provide one of the most haunting and lovely sets of sounds I've heard in recent years. T…
II
The label doesn't want to do notes anymore about his new releases. So we have to write some with our very good English. With these two names you can imagine that for sure the music will be closer to silence than to wall of noise. First we must say that no credit is written on the CD, like it was not important to know who is playing what and first what is played. CD1 is an instrumental piece signed by Radu Malfatti. CD2 by Jürg Frey where instruments are mixed with field recordings. It was r…
Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit, Raume 1 - 8, Raum 1
Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit: Räume 1–8 is an album by Jürg Frey. It is ranked number 12,910 in the overall greatest album chart with a total rank score of 54 from 1 greatest album chart. Weites Land, Tiefe Zeit: Räume 1–8 is ranked number 430 in the best albums of 2010 and number 1,471 in the best albums of the 2010s.
dedalus
On april 2012, Dedalus was invited to perform several Wandelweiser members' compositions in the Ancienne Brasserie Bouchoule which is an exhibition room run by Les Instants Chavirés. Special conditions concerning the rather weak noise insulation allowed a deep immersion of the music into the urban sound environment. This live recording includes two pieces by Antoine Beuger (Méditations poétiques sur quelque chose d'autre, Lieux de passage) and one by Jürg Frey (Canones incerti). On these …