This 7" single is the first release in a fictitious series of avant-garde music packaged in those cheap generic covers of hit singles from the 1950s and 1960s. The series opens with Nikolaus Gerszewski's 7-minute orchestral piece Beethoven Square, pragmatically split into parts I & II across the two sides of the record. The cover advertises the history of Edition Telemark, but is also an homage to the elegant product design of the period, which had drawn inspiration from Constructivism, the Bauhaus, and Pop Art. The presentation of contemporary art music as a consumer product may be understood as ironic commentary; however, it is also a practical and elegant solution to keep production costs down.
Nikolaus Gerszewski is a composer and concert organizer for experimental music, living in Hamburg and Budapest. He studied liberal arts in Hamburg and Düsseldorf in the 1980s and was engaged in non-representational art, before – as a consequence of a dematerialization process – switching to the medium of sound.
He describes Beethoven Square as follows: "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."
The piece won the Kompolize composition prize in 2024. The recording features the Lietzeorchester and was made in 2025 at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin.
