S M L XL are sizes, of course, but we look to the labels, not to the objects, to ascertain their size. My piece is full of objects that seem bigger/smaller than they are, act bigger/smaller than they are, or are bigger/smaller than their label suggests. This can take numerous forms. Some gestures ‘go on too long’, harmonies are stretched or distorted, gestures are too fast or loud, to really “speak” properly, uneasy dynamic balances. - Philipp Blume

At times, Eisblumen, a movement from Heinz Holliger’s Scardinelli Cycle, sounds like completely intuitive melodic composition, unified only by the distinctive timbre of seven instruments playing only natural harmonics on their detuned instruments. Holliger in fact governs the movement by taking a Bach Chorale from his Kreutstab Cantata, slowing it down so that it is six times as long as the original, and rescoring it’s harmonies with spatially notated free melodies in all the string instruments. - Michel Galante

Sacred Amnesia was composed in early 2001. Its sonic objects are constructed by reimagining existing recordings, often with particular historical resonance. The opening passage from Parsifal is quickly overtaken by a granular resynthesis with decreasing fidelity to the model, ultimately hollowing out the original and replacing it with strikingly different music. Later in the piece, a movement from Pierrot Lunaire is spectrally tuned to a diatonic scale, reflecting the notion that in the increasingly fragmented musical present, it is historically valid to compose as if Schoenberg’s body of work did not exist. Taking this idea further, the passage in question suggests how Schoenberg himself might have composed, had he pursued a different musical path than atonality, and ultimately, the 12-tone method. - Eric Lyon

Insofar as allegorical music is “music about other music,” Metamorphosen is the ultimate allegorical piece. It is an anguished lament over the downfall of Austrio- Germanic musical culture as a whole, even including a quotation of the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. Richard Strauss, whose idols were Mozart and Wagner, wrote this septet to express his devastation at the bombing of the Munich Opera House. “The world’s most holy shrine — destroyed,” he exclaimed. There is no evidence to prove, as some claim, that the Eroica quotation is an elegy to Hitler. Strauss deplored the Nazi Party’s skillful use of music as part of it’s propaganda machine, and became aware of how the war would degrade the world’s perception and experience of his musical tradition, a tradition destined have a deep and lasting association with a depraved society and dictatorship. Strauss received a letter from Paul Sacher, who asked to commission a work for 23 solo strings, the version of Metamorphosen most often heard today. This septet, not often heard, is a restoration completed by Rudolph Leopold after the original septet’s manuscript was discovered in the 1980s. The smaller scoring of the septet makes the complex counterpoint of this work very transparent, allowing the listener hear Strauss’ mastery of imitative devices and fugal procedures. - Michel Galante

Titled “From the Salvation Army: A Revival Service”, Charles Ives’ String Quartet No. 1 is based on hymn tunes popular in Ives’ time. He wrote the piece when we was twenty-one, and derived it from his earlier organ and string works. The first movement, Chorale, is a brightly sonorous fugal setting of the “Missionary Hymn,” with the “Coronation” tune as countersubject. An early instance of Ives’ lifelong engagement with vernacular material, this movement reveals, in a few fleeting dissonances, only hints of his later experiments with clashing strata of harmonies and meters. Ives later rewrote this movement as the third movement of his Fourth Symphony. In that context, its simplicity and straightforwardness is startlingly contrasted with the radical, very complex layering of ideas in the rest of the symphony. - Miranda Cuckson