St. Augustine advised his coevals to seek the truth in the ‘inner man’. Such inwardness seems far removed from the reality of life in the 21st -century. Perhaps that is why a tendency to focus on internal processes has emerged in the music of the last few decades – not in the sense of a new subjectivity, in which sentimental private matters are put on display, but rather in the sense of an exploratory introspection: It's a question of increasing the intensity.

Mark Andre seeks existential sonic situations on his path ‘toward the inside’ (nach innen, to quote the fully written-out title of his piece ‘ni’). Like Andre, the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho has also delved into the internal nature of sound. Her music originates in the rich variety of spectral harmonies and it sets itself the task of telling a very old story in a new way: a violin concerto as the legend of the grail. An entirely different aspect of inner life manifests itself in Ian Willcock's piece. He visits the discoverer of the unconscious, Sigmund Freud, on his deathbed. At the start of the 20th-century, Freud's glimpses of the ‘inside’ showed that there is more to be found there than the truth: the phantasm.