Wandelweiser is a loose international network of composers and performers, with its own publishing house and record label, Edition Wandelweiser, founded in 1992 by the Dutch composer and flautist Antoine Beuger and the German composer and violinist Burkhard Schlothauer. Its office in Haan, near Düsseldorf, collects scores and issues recordings. Over the years the circle has come to include Jürg Frey, Michael Pisaro, Manfred Werder, Eva-Maria Houben and Radu Malfatti, among others.
What unites these composers is silence treated as material rather than as a pause: long stretches of quiet, isolated soft tones and durations that test patience, in a line that descends from John Cage. The scale can be vast. Werder’s stück 1998 runs to some 4,000 pages of twelve-second units and would take more than three weeks to perform in full. For listeners raised on drone, Wandelweiser is the opposite pole of the same fascination with time: where a drone fills a room, these pieces empty it and let the room itself be heard.