Skills (2022)
(for 3 horns, tuba and string quartet)

Related works:

Despair from Skills

Immersion from Skills

In my parents' living room stands an elaborately hand-forged copper kettle - my grandfather's masterpiece, hammered out of a single piece of copper. Growing up in a family of craftsmen, I have been familiar since early childhood with the attitude of perfecting a thing for its own sake. The deepening concentration and slow maturing of execution, the craft shares with many spiritual rituals. 

I am touched by the sight of almost ideal expressions of human activity. I dedicate my latest album SKILLS to this fascination. An endless succession of changing skills has brought mankind to the present day. The skills that were originally life-supporting grew into handy crafts and art. This development through the times reflects the enormous changes in ethics, aesthetics and morals. People describe this process in many shades, from culturally pessimistic dystopias to posthumanist utopias.

SKILLS lives in this field - between hymn and melancholy. 
SKILLS is a composition divided into episodes for horn quartet, string orchestra, percussion and electronics.