QUATTRO
Exciting confrontation of sound worlds in the concert of the Department of New Music and Jazz
The Department of New Music and Jazz presents its wide-ranging variety of sounds in a joint concert by students from the accordion, jazz, new music, and electroacoustic music departments. Under the heading “QUATTRO,” the audience is cordially invited to this diverse and varied concert event on Sunday, January 18, at 7:30 p.m. in the Festsaal Fürstenhaus. Admission is free!
“The wide stylistic range extends from romantic adaptations, new music, contemporary jazz, and electroacoustic works to jazz repertoire,” explains Institute Director Prof. Maximilian Marcoll, who teaches electroacoustic composition at the Weimar Music University and the Bauhaus University Weimar. Two works from his own class will be projected via loudspeakers into the Festsaal: Steffen Rudolf's “Alpdrone / Numero 8” will be performed as a musical interpretation of Norbert Gruber's painting “Nummer 8,” and Philipp Waltinger's “Stehende Welle” will be premiered.
From the jazz department, the trio “Kayax” will take to the stage with electric guitar, keyboard, and drums: the distorted guitar flirts somewhat melancholically with playful synthesizer sounds, embedded in extraordinarily arranged rhythms.
A duo with Jonas Funk (piano) and Samuel Kraft (double bass) then breaks down jazz standards and uses the freedom of this music to paint new pictures with the color palette of the pieces. “With shared ideas, the basic building blocks of rhythm, harmony, and melody, as well as their spontaneous alteration, are presented in improvised compositions,” says Jonas Funk about the duo's music.
In addition, the six-piece “Wayne Shorter Ensemble” plays in homage to the American jazz saxophonist and composer Wayne Shorter, who died in 2023. “Our ensemble focuses on Shorter's incredibly exciting music from the 1960s,” says Berlin saxophonist Peter Ehwald, who leads the ensemble. “We play his style-defining sound aesthetics and his departure into modern jazz from our present-day perspective.”
QUATTRO is rounded off with musical contributions from Prof. Claudia Buder's accordion class, which will also open the 2026 accordion year at the Weimar Music university. The program includes the German premiere of Tomoya Yokokawa's “Ein Nachtfalter” (A Moth), a “song without words” penned by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and Bohuslav Martinů's “Polka in D.” “It's definitely going to be another ultra-colorful mix,” says Claudia Buder, already looking forward to the Department of Music's fourth concert.
[13 January 2026]