Lunch Concert 4A
Concert 4A marks a special moment of collaboration between Hamburg’s local music scene and international composers. A particular highlight are two world premieres written especially for the renowned Hamburg-based double bassist John Eckhardt. Known for his explorations at the boundaries between new music and sound art, Eckhardt here pushes the sonic extremes of his instrument in dialogue with the computer.
Alongside the focus on the double bass, the audience can expect a journey ranging from “electroacoustic romanticism” to AI-driven violin improvisations.
Program Overview
ULYSSES II
Roberto Cipollina and Eleonora Podestà
The Week
Henrik von Coler
Empress Luo
Yao Hsiao
confim, assim, sem fim
Rodrigo Pascale
The Water lily in the blaze
Natsuki Kambe
La Nuit Bleue
Zhixin Xu and Yunze Mu
About the pieces & artists
Roberto Cipollina & Eleonora Podestà: ULYSSES II
Ulysses 2 is a project conceived by composer Roberto Cipollina. The work serves both as a performative and technological exploration of real-time performer-machine interaction, emphasizing the role of AI not as a passive tool, but as an active and adaptive musical agent within the creative process.
The work is conceived as a closed-form improvisational structure for acoustic instrument and real-time interactive electronics, developed specifically to explore the creative potential of artificial intelligence in relation to the performer’s improvisation.
At the core of Ulysses 2 is the integration of Somax2, a real-time generative system developed within the Max environment, which enables responsive electronic behavior through the analysis and transformation of live performance data.
While the project fully embraces aleatory elements and the concept of extemporaneity, it also adheres to an organized formal structure that guides its overall development. In fact, the performer engages with a series of prompts provided by the composer, ensuring a coherent trajectory.
The electronic component, built from a database of sampled sounds recorded by Eleonora Sofia Podestà, responds and adapt to the performer’s expressive gestures in real-time. Through Somax2’s processing, the system generates musically congruent textures and transformations.
This piece highlights the software’s ability to translate performance parameters into musically coherent electronic answers, fostering a dynamic and co-creative dialogue between human performer and machine intelligence.
About the artists
Roberto Maria Cipollina is a composer and researcher in immersive technologies applied to music, whose works have been performed across Europe and America. His compositions include A Lover’s Tale (2018), Alchimie (2020), Lu Re d’Amuri (2022), and Al-Qantarah (2024). Author of two musicological books and lecturer on palazzi della memoria in music, artificial intelligence, and virtual reality, his works are internationally performed and published by Da Vinci Records.
Eleonora Podestà
Henrik von Coler: The Week
One Week is an acousmatic composition that integrates a staged reading in live performance. Drawing on an introspective autobiographical text, it reflects on emotional states and personal experiences during periods of transition and uncertainty. The work may be understood as a form of Electroacoustic Romanticism: in line with the 2026 ICMC theme, One Week translates romantic ideas into the language of electroacoustic music. In doing so, it explores a balance between technological investigation and personal expressivity. At the same time, the piece seeks to reach a broader range of listeners by foregrounding emotional engagement and incorporating a contemporary text that resonates with present-day cultural contexts.
The tape part of One Week is constructed from autobiographical field recordings combined with analog signal processing and experimental sound synthesis. In addition to conventional contemporary techniques, the production draws on echo chambers, analog and digital tape machines, and vintage synthesizers and effects units. This process produces dense, noisy, and organic timbres and textures while consciously engaging with recognizable tropes of acousmatic music. During performance, the tape part is live-diffused by the composer. Delivered in Ambisonics (up to seventh order), the work can be realized on a wide range of spatial sound systems, in both 2D and 3D configurations.
The staged reading is performed by a musician and multimedia artist zl!ster, who collaborated closely with the composer to refine the original text for performance. Through this revision, the text is reshaped for the present moment while remaining anchored in the work’s autobiographical framework.
About the artist
Performer: zl!ster is a Panamanian-American artist based out of Atlanta, Georgia. His music embodies self-exploration through misinterpretations and exaggerations of real life. At times, his work is a direct reflection of self; at others, it is distorted, shaped more by perception than reality. Rooted in curiosity and at times bravado, his music lives in the realms of alternative rap and indie rock.
Composer: Henrik von Coler is a musician and researcher, working at the intersection of art, science and technology. In 2024 he founded the Lab for Interaction and Immersion (L42i) at Georgia Tech’s School of Music. Before that he was the director of the Electronic Music Studio at TU Berlin and head of the Computer Music Team at the Audio Communication Group. In his research and creative work, Henrik has explored various aspects of electronic music and musical instruments. This includes interface design, algorithms for sound generation and experimental concepts for composition and performance. Most of his projects treat space as an integral part of music. In 2017 he founded the Electronic Orchestra Charlottenburg – an ensemble of up to 12 electronic musicians – to explore music interaction on immersive loudspeaker systems. He has since worked on ways to enhance how musicians and audiences experience spatial music and sound art.
Yao Hsiao: Empress Luo
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About the artist
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Rodrigo Pascale: confim, assim, sem fim
“confim, assim, sem fim” was composed in 2024 during the Laboratorio de Composición Mixta of Resonancias Iberoamericanas. It is dedicated to the Festival Expresiones Contemporáneas and to Francisco. This composition explores the concept of infinity within limited systems.
The pre-compositional research involved extensive explorations of harmonies based on mathematical ratios. I established a structure featuring 15 harmonies, beginning with two frequencies at a ratio of 16/15. Each subsequent harmony added a new frequency derived from the initial ratio, multiplied by a series of ratios following the sequence [16/15, 15/14, 14/13, 13/12, 12/11, 11/10, 10/9, 9/8, 8/7, 7/6, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 3/2, 2/1]. Notably, some harmonies—including the second—utilized this sequence in reverse. For instance, the ratio [15/14] was employed as the foundation for the first two frequencies, while the third harmony emerged from multiplying [15/14] by [16/15], yielding [8/7].
The forward sequence often led to more dissonant harmonies, while the backward sequence inclined towards consonance, and I frequently juxtaposed the two. An exception occurred between harmonies 13 and 14, where both utilized forward sequences to create heightened tension, concluding in a consonant 15th harmony. The sequence employs a set of regressive numbers, each divided by its preceding integer. This approach allows for the potential to extend beyond 2/1 to 1/0, thus engaging with a well-known mathematical problem. As the results of division increase when the denominator decreases, division by zero is said to “tend to infinity.”
In this exploration, I realized that the logical conclusion of the composition was to approach infinity musically. However, I confronted the challenge that the double bass can only produce a finite range of sounds, and that the human hearing spans approximately from 20 Hz to 20 kHz. Faced with this problem, I sought solutions that transcended the confines of the system itself. This led me to investigate how the limitations of our auditory perception could be brought to the forefront, creating illusions of seemingly ever-rising glissandi and of rhythm turning to pitch. The transformation of percussive sounds into frequencies and the use of Shepard tones played a crucial role in this composition.
confim, assim, sem fim delves into the boundaries of auditory perception, aiming to investigate the concept of infinity within limited systems. This composition begins with a sequence of harmonies, where subtle facets of infinty aer explored through the techniques of the double bass. In its culminating section, the work unveils the full potential of this exploration by incorporating exceptionally high frequencies and an enduring reverberation, creating an immersive sonic landscape that invites listeners to experience the infinity within these media.
About the artist
Rodrigo Pascale (b. 1996) is an internationally awarded Brazilian composer whose works have been performed worldwide by leading ensembles including JACK Quartet, ICE, MCME, Splinter Reeds, loadbang, Hypercube, Hinge, and Sound Icon. A Prix CIME 2025 recipient and Gaudeamus Award 2026 Finalist, he is pursuing a DMA at Peabody and has studied with Haas, Kampela, Fineberg, Wubbels, and Hersch.
Natsuki Kambe: The Water lily in the blaze
I attempted to compose a piece that makes use of the wide range and rich timbral possibilities of the contrabass. In addition to the instrument’s inherent variety of tone colors, I further explored new sounds through live electronics.
The low register conveys a powerful, flame-like energy. The high register, produced through flageolet harmonics, has a beautiful tone with a delicate charm reminiscent of water lilies. These two contrasting elements are brought together into a single image: a burning sunset reflected on a pond, and water lilies blooming in its shadow.
In Max, I used TR.lib by Professor Takayuki Rai. Throughout the piece, grbFM is used extensively: in the low register it generates noise such as quarter tones, while in the high register it creates chordal textures inspired by the Japanese traditional wind instrument shō.
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Professor Takayuki Rai for the many valuable suggestions he provided during the creation of this work.
About the artist
Natsuki Kambe was born in 2004 in Yokohama, Japan. They began studying piano at the age of five and started composition studies with Kazuo Mise at the age of fifteen. In 2020, she graduated from the Music Department of Toho Girls’ High School.
In the same year, they entered Toho Gakuen College of Music as a composition major and are currently a third-year student (as of January 2026). Since April 2024, she has been studying computer music under Takayuki Rai.
Zhixin Xu and Yunze Mu: La Nuit Bleue
La nuit bleue is a piece written for solo harpsichord and live electronics. After three years of harpsichord study, I had a strong thought in my mind that write a piece for harpsichord and live electronics. After the spectral analysis of the harpsichord sound as well as look through some pieces like Saariaho’s Jardin Secret II and Cage’s HPSCHD, I realized that live spectral processing of this kind of idiophonic sound would be a big challenge because of the broad frequency distribution in spectrum. So, I decided to use both fixed sounds and live processed sounds in the electronic part. Jardin Secret II and HPSCHD inspired me a lot while looking for sounds for electronics. Both of them contain noisy and glitchy sound in the tape part which are homogenies to harpsichord sound in some aspect, although somehow radical for the time they were composed, they worked well for harpsichord sound. With this idea, I set the tone of the timbral character for this piece.
About the artist
Zhixin Xu is a composer, sound artist and computer music researcher based in Shanghai, China. His compositions often involving electronics, sometimes generated by the software he develops. Much of his recent music has been focused on exploring how purely computer-generated sound materials can be used along with musical instruments and purely acoustic sounds. His music and multimedia works have been heard in the U.S, Europe and Asia on many events including ICMC and SEAMUS conferences.
Xu holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music where he studied with Mara Helmuth, and earlier degrees from CCM and the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He is now assistant professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His compositions are available on the ABLAZE label.