When New Music began to emerge on the inner horizon, Ulrich Stranz became engrossed in a game with just a few notes. He distrusted the routine trick and plumbed the seemingly familiar. Introverted alternative worlds fascinated him, as well as questions connected to time and its modes.

The selection for this WERGO CD includes representative works that were composed or revised between 1971 and 2001. Developments and constants of Ulrich Stranz’s musical idiom are revealed, and a rounded portrait emerges – of the larger, coherent context.

“At the beginning of the 1970s a new generation of composers undertook to free the categories of material which had been dominated till then from their ideological chains and to make the processes available beyond the limits of quasi-moralist pretensions. The composers in question, young at the time, among them Ulrich Stranz, thus provided a wide field of action for musical expression, an achievement which is still waiting for historical recognition. This ‘greater freedom’ leads, as such things always do, to irritations, as is always the case where trails laid to show the march route become rarer.” (Wilhelm Killmayer)