Origins & Context

17 July 2021

More than a year had passed since the recording of Söhne der Witwe in June 2020. During those thirteen months, almost every aspect of my life had changed.

In the autumn of 2020, I left the family home and moved into an apartment nearby in Cham. My younger daughter, who was thirteen at the time, decided to come with me. A few months later, my older daughter joined us as well.

The beginning was extraordinarily simple.

I had found a good apartment, but I had very little with which to furnish it. Some furniture could be taken over inexpensively from previous tenants. A neighbour lent me a mattress because I did not yet have a bed of my own. My younger daughter initially slept on a camping mat. Friends helped us with dishes and other necessities. There was my piano, my car, our dog, and gradually the things required to create a new home.

Objectively, the circumstances were difficult. Subjectively, however, I experienced something quite different.

I felt free.

My younger daughter and I developed our own daily life together, and despite the simplicity of our circumstances, I remember this period as one of extraordinary liberation. We were building something new from almost nothing.

The separation itself remained complicated. Attempts to find a formal solution through mediation did not ultimately lead to an agreement, and I decided not to force an immediate divorce. For the time being, separation provided sufficient stability for the children and for me. My priority was to allow the situation to settle rather than to create further conflict.

At the same time, my professional life was undergoing another dramatic transformation.

The distribution business that had grown so successfully during 2020 became increasingly difficult. The business model was being reorganised by the manufacturer, while I was becoming progressively less able to work in the personal manner that had originally made the business successful for me.

In May 2021, my involvement in the business effectively ended.

The change was abrupt. A business that had provided a substantial part of my livelihood disappeared within a very short period of time. Another advisory project had also come to an end. I was responsible for two daughters living with me and suddenly faced the prospect of having almost no continuing income.

For a brief period, the situation was existential.

I explained openly to my daughters that our financial situation might become very difficult. Both of my daughters nevertheless chose to remain with me as we continued building our new life together. Their decision meant a great deal to me. It also made the responsibility I carried very clear.

I began contacting people in my professional network immediately.

One of them put me in touch with a rapidly growing Swiss company that needed additional people. The timing was extraordinary. Within approximately two weeks of losing my previous business, I had begun working again as a salaried employee.

The salary was considerably more modest than the income I had experienced during the strongest period of my distribution business. But at that moment its significance was much greater than its amount.

It arrived every month.

After several years of entrepreneurship and financial uncertainty, that simple fact gave me something I had almost forgotten: predictability. I could pay the rent, the insurance and our everyday expenses. I had work that interested me, and I could see the possibility of building something again.

There were still serious financial pressures, particularly the cost of my older daughter’s education. At moments when I could not solve these problems alone, people who had known me for many years stepped forward and helped me. Their generosity enabled me to continue meeting my responsibilities while rebuilding my professional life.

Looking back, I remain deeply grateful for that support.

There was another important change in my private life.

Earlier in 2021, I had met a woman with whom I entered my first relationship after the separation. What mattered to me was not simply that I was in a relationship again. I experienced a kind of affection and everyday care that felt new to me.

She cooked for me, cared for me and took an interest in what I was doing. She also loved listening to me play the piano.

On 17 July 2021, she came with me to the recording studio.

She sat there while I played.

By then, the acute fear of May had receded. I had a job. My daughters were with me. The immediate financial catastrophe I had feared had not occurred. I was in love, and for the first time in months I could again imagine that the future might be manageable.

I did not enter the studio with a programme for the improvisation. As with the other works in the cycle, I did not attempt to translate individual events into music.

I simply played.

Listening to the recording today, I would therefore resist interpreting its individual passages as representations of particular events. The music was not conceived as a narrative of my separation, the loss of my business, my daughters, my new relationship or the people who had helped me.

Those things constituted the life from which I entered the studio.

The distinction matters.

Between June 2020 and July 2021, I had left a marriage, established a new home with my daughters, experienced professional success and sudden professional loss, confronted the possibility of financial failure, returned to salaried employment, received unexpected help from people around me, and fallen in love again.

By 17 July 2021, none of these experiences had produced certainty.

But I was moving again.

And on that evening, I sat down at the piano and recorded Die Reisen des Gesellen.

The Title

The title Die Reisen des Gesellen — The Journeys of the Fellowcraft — emerged from the way I experienced the preceding year.

When I recorded the improvisation on 17 July 2021, I felt that I had travelled an extraordinary distance.

Almost nothing in my life had remained where it had been twelve months earlier. I had left my former home, established a new life with my daughters, experienced professional success and sudden professional loss, returned to salaried employment, received unexpected support from people around me, and entered a new relationship.

Only twelve days after the recording, I described the preceding year on Instagram as a “disruptive journey.”

At the time, however, I did not experience the recording primarily as a document of crisis. Quite the opposite. I described the music as brighter and more confident than my previous recordings and wrote of a transformation that felt almost celebratory.

I believed that I had come through something.

The word Geselle was therefore important to me.

It belongs naturally to the language of Freemasonry, which has accompanied me for many years. But I was not using the word to describe my formal Masonic position or to communicate a particular ritual meaning. By 2021, I had long since progressed beyond the degree of Fellowcraft.

For me, the Geselle in the title was something more personal: a traveller who learns through experience, who passes through changing circumstances and who continues towards mastery.

At that moment, I believed that this particular journey was approaching its end.

I had work again. My daughters were with me. I was in love. After a period of profound uncertainty, I could once again imagine continuity and stability. I felt that I had survived the journey and could now move forward.

Looking back from a greater distance, the title has acquired an additional meaning for me.

What I experienced in July 2021 as an arrival was, in fact, another stage of the journey. There were further transformations ahead that I could not yet see.

But those belong to later recordings.

Die Reisen des Gesellen should remain where it was created: at a moment when I genuinely believed that I had travelled through uncertainty and emerged on the other side.

For a while, I thought the journey was over.

It was not.

But perhaps that is precisely why the title still feels right.

Musical Analysis

17 July 2021
Duration: approximately 24:42

Die Reisen des Gesellen is an extended piano improvisation whose large-scale form is shaped less by a single continuous development than by a succession of contrasting musical states. Over almost twenty-five minutes, passages of movement, hesitation, accumulation and withdrawal follow one another without settling into a conventional predetermined structure.

Form and Development

The opening establishes the musical space without immediately defining a clear destination. Rather than presenting a theme that will subsequently be developed in a traditional sense, the improvisation introduces gestures, harmonic fields and patterns of movement from which the larger form gradually emerges.

One of the most striking characteristics of the recording is its episodic architecture. Energy is repeatedly generated and then interrupted or redirected. Moments that appear capable of becoming climactic are not necessarily allowed to fulfil that expectation. The music can expand, retreat and begin again from a different position.

This gives the work a particularly strong sense of continuation through transformation. Its coherence does not depend on the literal return of a single theme. Instead, it is created through recurring contrasts: activity and suspension, density and openness, insistence and release.

Harmonic Language

The harmonic language remains broadly tonal in its gravitational behaviour, but tonal stability is rarely permanent. Certain pitches and chordal regions function temporarily as points of orientation before the improvisation moves elsewhere.

Consonant and relatively open sonorities coexist with darker and more ambiguous harmonic regions. The transitions between them are often gradual. Rather than functioning as conventional modulations between clearly established keys, harmonic changes frequently arise from the movement of individual voices, repeated figures or the gradual alteration of a sonority.

As a result, harmony functions not simply as a structural framework but as an important means of changing the emotional and physical character of the musical space.

Rhythm and Movement

Rhythm plays a significant role in generating momentum, although the improvisation is not governed by a single persistent pulse.

At several points, repeated figures and more continuous patterns create a pronounced sense of forward movement. Elsewhere, this propulsion loosens considerably. Phrases become more isolated, and resonance and silence acquire greater structural importance.

The alternation between these two conditions prevents the work from becoming rhythmically predictable. Movement repeatedly establishes itself, loses its certainty and subsequently re-emerges.

Density and Dynamics

The dynamic range is broad, but the most important feature is not simply the contrast between loud and soft passages. It is the way musical density changes over time.

There are passages in which the keyboard becomes a highly active field, with gestures accumulating and overlapping. These are counterbalanced by substantially more exposed regions in which individual sounds and their decay become audible as structural events in themselves.

Consequently, silence is not merely an absence between phrases. It participates in the form.

The work contains several waves of intensification rather than one dominant central climax. This distinguishes its architecture from a conventional arch form. Particularly significant is the late resurgence of energy: after much of the musical journey has already unfolded, the improvisation is still capable of producing renewed force.

The Final Section

The closing part is especially important to the overall architecture.

Instead of simply exhausting the energy accumulated earlier, the music undergoes a renewed intensification relatively late in the recording. This gives the final phase an unexpected structural weight: the work does not behave as though its trajectory has already been decided.

Only after this late resurgence does the music finally begin to relinquish its momentum.

The ending therefore feels less like the completion of a predetermined argument than like the point at which continued movement is no longer necessary. The music withdraws rather than delivering a conventional emphatic resolution.

Overall Architecture

At its broadest level, the improvisation might be described as:

emergence — movement — interruption — renewed movement — expansion — withdrawal — resurgence — release

This should not be understood as a sequence of fixed sections. The boundaries are fluid, and several of these states recur in altered forms.

What gives Die Reisen des Gesellen its identity is precisely this refusal to proceed in a straight line. The music continually establishes direction while retaining the possibility of abandoning it.

Musical Character

Among the recordings in the cycle, this improvisation is notable for its sense of mobility and changing perspective. Its long duration does not result from the expansion of a single musical idea. Rather, the work seems to discover successive environments and ways of moving through them.

There are moments of confidence and propulsion, but also hesitation, suspension and renewed searching. None is allowed to define the work completely.

The result is an improvisation whose coherence emerges retrospectively. What initially appears to be a succession of independent impulses gradually reveals a larger continuity — not because the music follows a predetermined route, but because each new state grows out of what has preceded it.