Samuel Reinhard

• Discography

  • Movement

    2024, Hallow Ground / Praesens Editionen, Vinyl + Digital
    Movement is built from notes softly held. In his ongoing investigation of musical duration, perception, and attention, Samuel Reinhard deemphasizes progress through an embrace of repetition and negative space, inviting listeners to linger in time. Read More
    Instrumental recordings are arranged according to a predetermined system, iterating fragments of sound in overlapping intervals of various sizes. Delicately layered snippets of decaying piano are joined by cello (Leila Bordreuil), bass flute (John Also Bennett), double bass (Vincent Yuen Ruiz), baritone sax (Michael Biel), and harp (Shelley Burgon).
    This breadth of instrumentation, arriving as individual notes stretched and overlapped, is treated not as an opportunity for immersive coalescence, but rather a gentle augmentation of texture, free-floating counterpoint. Notes are accompanied by the traces of the bodies and actions that produce them: a hand pressing a key or an arm keeping a bow aloft; breath filling an instrument’s body or glancing off its surface; a string vibrating and then softening to stillness. In sum, we hear resonance in the process of being sustained, as well as in the release that follows. Read Less

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  • For Piano and Shō

    2024, elsewhere music, CD & Digital
    To be slow and to be still: thro ugh his explorations of repetition, Samuel Reinhard extends this invitation to both listeners and the musicians who perform his compositions. Read More
    For Piano and Shō brings together Haruna Higashida, a Tokyo-based gagaku performer active in contemporary music, and Copenhagen-based Canadian pianist Paul Jacob Fossum. The album’s two pieces were recorded between Copenhagen and Tokyo, where Reinhard was in residence in 2023.
    In the first piece, recorded in a multitrack session, three pianos pursue and repeat their respective thread-like motifs, slowly encircling each other at their own pace. The pianos are accompanied by three shōs, playing individual notes and chords from a circumscribed pool of material and providing harmonic "reflections" of the melodic motifs played by the pianos. Together, the resulting material is ever-changing. In the second piece, a piano moves through a trio of figures—an arpeggio, an improvisation, a chord—for the duration of the performance. Each iteration of this sequence is accompanied by a single shō, which freely selects and plays a note or chord, emerging from the piano's first figure and disappearing into the third.
    Throughout, players hold notes through touch or breath until sound decays. Small improvisations, a piano note coming into contact with the delicate asymmetry of the shō’s intervals, dissolve into pools of deepening quiet. Reinhard has remarked that, by giving performers freedom to play less or more within a given duration, they are able to “do nothing and just listen for periods of time as they are performing, creating a kinship between the performer and the listener—where both engage in a deep and concentrated way of listening.” Here, the shared act of listening, completed by the pieces’ audience, leaves its mark as an afterglow—a sensation of time stretched, all the details and feelings that emerge from a world slowed.  Read Less

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  • Two Pianos and String Trio

    2023, Praesens Editionen / Hallow Ground, Cassette + Digital
    Two Pianos and String Trio is a set of chamber pieces, written for piano and strings and recorded in a former church in Copenhagen. Read More
    The two works unfold slowly, the possibility of stillness lapping at the edges of each gently rendered note. “Moments of silence are okay,” the score reassures its performers. “They are welcome.”
    Reinhard’s experiments of late have brought to the fore the environmental and digital textures that arise when various instruments are recorded and collaged. The unmanipulated recordings that make up Two Pianos and String Trio offer a variation on that perspective from within a continuous, even narrative performance. Aching and affecting as the melodic progressions that make up Two Pianos and String Trio can be, Reinhard’s generosity as a composer lies most of all in his treatment of instrumental silences as openings for environmental presence.
    The church in which these works were recorded is porous to the outside world, and this music is too. As a sustained piano note fades, it makes space for sonic interjections beyond Reinhard’s jurisdiction. Is that the wind, some birds, a plane overhead? These presences tend to mingle with the listener’s own environs, such that each listening acquires its own textures, its own specificity, cobbling together the immediate and distant into a layered world of small aural possibilities. Read Less

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  • Repetitions

    2022, Praesens Editionen / Hallow Ground, Cassette + Digital
    On Repetitions, Samuel Reinhard brings us close enough to a piece of music that its systematic nature begins to buckle and fade. Read More
    Across four movements, three pianos pursue their own respective threadbare motifs, which overlap at the hands of a predetermined ratio of duration. What unfolds—at first glance slow, melancholic, deliberate, even plain—is a study of repetition’s in-betweens, populated by unexpected resonances and delicate traces of notes in the process of being played by human hands. The three pianos are not in sync, but are nevertheless in relation, the nature of which shifts with the listener’s orientation and attention. Each piece within Repetitions arrives as a constant whole, containing harmonies and silences that are in a never-ending process of unfurling. Read Less

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  • Interior

    2021, Praesens Editionen, Vinyl + Digital
    On Interior, his follow-up to 2020’s “Miniatures”, Samuel Reinhard excavates intricate resonances at the periphery of our attention. Read More
    Across four movements of near-equal length, Reinhard once again follows a process whereby he layers and loops fragments of piano improvisations, imposing an asymmetric system that generates an unending growth of sound. “Interior” complicates its own systematicity, however, by using samples that are not only recognizable as piano notes, but as live recordings of a piano being played.
    As such, the experience of hearing these “Interiors” is driven by the delicate timelessness of a pried-open piano chord: one is invited to tender stillness, even reverence. And yet Reinhard composes from traces both analog and digital, leaving the seams of his work exposed. Texture arrives in the form of static hiss and clicks, but also the soft trace of a finger pressing a key, the shuffle of a body shifting position in the close architecture of a small room. Having already stalled and stretched our sense of time, Reinhard asks us to think about where we are, and how close we are willing to look, feel, and listen. Over the course of these four movements sounds return again and again, familiar but transformed. What sounds like repetition is something more like accumulation, a thickening of space. Whether regarded at intimate range or from a distance, these compositions reveal more the longer we linger in the presence of each. Read Less

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  • Miniatures

    2020, Praesens Editionen, Vinyl + Digital
    On Miniatures, Samuel Reinhard looks to indeterminate techniques of mid-century experimental composers to produce a sonic path forward that’s as refined as it is evocative. Read More
    While Miniatures is built from recordings of short piano gestures decaying towards silence, amid the four movements that comprise the suite, something else grows. Notes cycle, collide, and wash away within boundaries the artist has set, but in their wake new processual textures develop. A hiss blankets the harmonic material, and clicks that once marked sharp cuts between repetitions become a percussive undercurrent.
    Working with digital tools, Reinhard conjures the interior of an animate environment and extends an invitation to notice the small stuff that swells when we settle in with duration. Read Less

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• Performances

  • Repetitions

    2022, Suedpol, Lucerne, Switzerland
    Four pieces for three pianos, performed by Vincent Yuen Ruiz, Margaux Oswald and PJ Fossum

  • Objects

    2015, Espace Libre / Centre Pasquart, Biel, Switzerland
    Algorithmic composition for samplers and improvised woodwind, performed by Hans Koch.

    1. Objects

• Commissions

  • Almost Nothing

    2022, sic! Raum für Kunst / Elephanthouse, Lucerne, Switzerland
    2-channel audio, PVC foil.

    1. Almost Nothing Audio

  • Music For An Elevator

    2016, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland
    Composition commissioned by John Armleder and Stéphane Armleder for the museum’s elevator.

    1. Music for an Elevator Audio

  • 333 – Sample

    2015, Schwarzwaldallee, Basel, Switzerland
    Sound and video installation developed in collaboration with Jeff Rossi and Dominik Hodel.

  • First Smell of the Moon

    2015, Space O'NewWall, Seoul, Republic Of Korea
    Sound and video installation developed in collaboration with Sinae Yoo.

    1. First Smell of the Moon Audio

  • Untitled0000001

    2013, PROGR, Bern, Switzerland
    Single-channel video developed in collaboration with Sinae Yoo. Read More
    In their collaborative single-channel video and audio work Untitled0000001, Sinae Yoo and Samuel Reinhard explore the idea of creating a contemplative space within a pattern of visual repetition versus sustained sonic transformation. Read Less

• Writing

  • How the Desert Taught Me to Rest and Listen

    2023, V/A - Various Artists READ

• About

  • Samuel Reinhard (b. 1980) is a Swiss composer. Guided by minimalist and aleatoric tenets, Reinhard's work emphasizes repetition and extended duration. Read More
    His compositions are not unlike tapestries, built from shifting horizontal threads between which emerge unexpected resonances as they iterate and layer. From a distance unassuming and all but eventless, Reinhard’s work is nonetheless driven by constant, subtle inner change. In his compositional practice he engages with sonic matter and processes like instrumentation and recording on a granular level, while interrogating and exploring the intricacies of perception and the act of listening itself.
    He earned his MA in Contemporary Arts Practice (Music & Media Arts) from Bern University of the Arts, and has been awarded grants and artist residencies from the Swiss Arts Council, the Music Commission of the City of Bern, the Department of Culture of the Canton of Bern, and others. Reinhard lives and works in New York City. Read Less

    
    
    

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