Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire", commonly known simply as Pierrot lunaire, Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Albert Giraud's cycle of the same name as translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The work is written for reciter who delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style accompanied by a small instrumental ensemble. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. Though the music is atonal, it does not employ Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique, which he did not use until 1921.
Dieter Schnebel was a German composer, theologian and musicologist. He composed orchestral music, chamber music, vocal music and stage works. From 1976 until his retirement in 1995, Schnebel served as professor of experimental music at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin.
Jan (Janice) DeGaetani was an American mezzo-soprano known for her performances of contemporary classical vocal compositions.
Boris Blacher was a German composer and librettist.
Richard Danielpour is an American composer and academic, currently affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Elena Olegovna Firsova is a Russian composer.
A Pierrot ensemble is a musical ensemble comprising flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano. This ensemble is named after 20th-century composer Arnold Schoenberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire, which includes the quintet of instruments above with a narrator.
Volker David Kirchner was a German composer and violist. After studies of violin and composition at the Peter Cornelius Conservatory, the Hochschule für Musik Köln and the Hochschule für Musik Detmold, he worked for decades as a violist in the Radio-Sinfonie-Orchester Frankfurt. He was simultaneously the violist in the Kehr Trio founded by his violin teacher Günter Kehr, and a composer of incidental music at the Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden.
Graham Waterhouse is an English composer and cellist who specializes in chamber music. He has composed a cello concerto, Three Pieces for Solo Cello and Variations for Cello Solo for his own instrument, and string quartets and compositions that juxtapose a quartet with a solo instrument, including Piccolo Quintet, Bassoon Quintet and the piano quintet Rhapsodie Macabre. He has set poetry for speaking voice and cello, such as Der Handschuh, and has written song cycles. His compositions reflect the individual capacity and character of players and instruments, from the piccolo to the contrabassoon.
Rudi Spring is a German composer of classical music, pianist and academic. He is known for vocal compositions on texts by poets and his own, and for chamber music such as his three Chamber Symphonies.
Jens Josef is a German composer of classical music, a flutist and academic teacher.
Mohammed Fairouz is an American composer.
Herbert Blendinger was an Austrian composer and viola player of German origin.
Der Handschuh is a composition by Graham Waterhouse. He wrote the setting of Friedrich Schiller's ballad for cello and speaking voice in 2005. It was published in 2007 in Heinrichshofen's Verlag.
Martina Koppelstetter is a German mezzo-soprano in opera and concert. She is particularly interested in contemporary music.
Rhapsodie Macabre is a composition for piano and string quartet in one movement by Graham Waterhouse, written in 2011 as a homage to Franz Liszt. It was first performed at a Liszt festival of the Gasteig, Munich, with the composer playing the cello part.
Miku Nishimoto-Neubert is a classical pianist.
Graham Waterhouse, cellist and composer especially of chamber music, has written a number of works for string quartet, three major works in several movements, several smaller works and compositions for a solo instrument and string quartet.
Juliana Hall is an American composer of art songs, monodramas, and vocal chamber music. She has been described by the NATS Journal of Singing as "one of our country’s most able and prolific art song composers for almost three decades" and, in discussing her 1989 song cycle Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush, the Journal went on to assert that "Even at this very early stage in her life and career, Hall knew something about crafting music whose beauty could enhance the text at hand without drawing attention away from that text. This is masterful writing in every respect."
Birkenlicht is a cello sonata by Graham Waterhouse, composed in 2023 in memory of the poet Hans Krieger. It was premiered in Munich that year.
