Yuko Zama (YZ): This album ‘For 10 Musicians’ consists of four pieces, but I particularly like how it sounds like a single, continuous 50-minute work. Listening to this album feels like an experience filled with stillness and introspection. While there are no dramatic changes in the music over the 50 minutes, I feel its musical power quietly builds through slow, almost imperceptible shifts. It evokes the gentle, effortless changes of snow falling silently, and I believe this lends the music an organic beauty, free from artificiality.
Could you please tell us about the background of these pieces? What was your goal in creating them?
Samuel Reinhard (SR): I’ve been thinking about writing for a larger ensemble for a few years, but started working on these pieces in earnest in spring 2024 and finished writing in early 2025. As is often the case in my process, I experimented with a number of different approaches and instrumentation for several months, before ultimately settling on the two pianos plus wind and strings sections.
I was interested in further pursuing a kind of “'non-directional” ' music. Music that was not necessarily "'going anywhere“ ' and instead would simply propagate minute changes and developments while otherwise remaining “'in place". '. In a sense, this is a continuation of my working toward a kind of music that feels as though it was “'resting in itself”. '. The image of silent snowfall is really beautiful. And I think it’s a great example of something that is constantly changing, while at the same time—and maybe somewhat paradoxically—evoking stillness.
The pieces are comprised of two main components: on one hand there are two dyads which are being repeated by two pianos (one dyad assigned to each player). On the other hand, there is a “'pool” ' of notes from which the pianists may improvise short figures. The string and wind players may choose and play individual notes from that same pool. While the pieces' color palette is defined by the dyads and available notes, the resulting harmonic material is to an extent left to chance and object to continuous change (there is no fixed meter, and aside from the piano dyads it is left to the performers how much or how little they would like to play within their assigned time bracket.
YZ: Why did you choose these ten instruments—two pianos, four string instruments, and four clarinets—for these pieces? SR: The piano has been a focal point in my work and it’s an instrument I keep returning to. I particularly enjoy working with multiple pianos in a way where each performer plays so little that it isn’t immediately evident that we’re hearing more than one instrument. It’s only as a piece progresses and the individual performer’s pursuits begin to overlap and merge that the listener might realize that this isn’t just a single piano we’re hearing. There’s something about that particular sense of ambiguity that I find very appealing.
Over the course of the past few years, I’ve experimented with gradually expanding the textural palette of my piano pieces with more instruments. I’ve previously worked with strings on “Two Pianos and String Trio” (2022) and with reed players on “For Piano and Shō” (2024). So working with a slightly larger ensemble that would incorporate strings and woodwind felt like an appealing exploration.
YZ: How did your collaboration with these ten musicians begin and evolve for this project? Also, how did you record the session?
SR: I was lucky to work with a core group of musicians with whom I’ve been collaborating for many years now (Paul Jacob Fossum, Vincent Yuen Ruiz, Nicole Hogstrand), as well as a number of incredibly gifted performers who played my music for the first time. After workshopping and discussing the pieces with Paul Jacob while he was passing through New York last fall, and similar “workshops” done remotely with Vincent Yuen Ruiz (who was leading the string section) and Carolyn Goodwin (who was leading the wind section), we rehearsed and recorded the pieces over a single weekend at the beautiful studios at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Music. I feel truly blessed in having a wonderful recording engineer in Juan Felipe Arce Bayona, who’s been recording pretty much all my sessions for the past five years or so. He’s just an incredible engineer and so good at capturing the intimacy and detail of these performances.
YZ: What were your thoughts on their performances when you listened to them later? Was there anything that impressed or surprised you?
SR: I knew that every performer involved was an incredibly talented individual. But I was nonetheless amazed by how the group began to coalesce as a whole after just a few rehearsal takes. I feel like having a group of players locking into a sense of “'group consciousness” ' is one of music’s most magical aspects.
YZ: You mixed these recordings beautifully yourself. I'm also impressed with your sound engineering. You seem to have a keen ear for delicate sounds. Could you tell us about your mixing process and your goals for the final sound?
SR: I have a background in sound engineering, and the idea of the recording studio as a compositional tool remains at the center of my practice. In my recorded work, I’m really interested in capturing and preserving the totality of a performance. This includes the sound of instruments, but just as much the sound of the space a piece is recorded in, the sound of human bodies moving in that space, as well as the sound of the studio itself and the technology used to capture the recording.
Silence plays a crucial role in most of my work. It is employed as a contrapuntal force, in a way that ascribes those moments where something is being played and those where nothing is being played equal importance. Of course this silence is never a total silence, but rather space that allows for the observation of a composition's in-betweens: the resonances and the traces of notes being played by human bodies in a physical space, as well as sonic qualities of the recording chain—like for example the subtle accumulation of noise as the result of a multitude of microphones and pre-amps being used. I think of all these elements as parts of the “greater whole” that ultimately makes the piece and the recording.
At the mixing stage, I try to intervene as little as possible, only employing cosmetic EQing, maybe some panning and adjustment of balance levels.
YZ: To date, you have released several works on various labels, including your 2024 album For Piano and Shō (elsewhere 032), which features Paul Jacob Fossum on piano and Haruna Higashida on shō. Do you have a consistent goal for all your compositions? Or do you have a different theme and goal for each work?
SR: There are certain themes that have been foundational to my work over the past few years; repetition, slowness, stillness, silence. Applied as compositional strategies, these tools contribute to a kind of aesthetic and philosophic framework to my work that has remained fairly constant. That said, I’m very interested in exploring new territory and strategies with each new piece. This might be in the form of systemic frameworks at the core of the music itself, or in experimenting with textural and timbral aspects or the combination of particular groups of instruments, performance techniques etc. With “For 10 Musicians” I was mostly interested in further evolving the repetition-based, “semi-aleatoric” approach I’ve initially developed for smaller groups of performers (“Two Pianos and String Trio”, “For Piano and Shō”) with a larger ensemble and an extended textural palette.
Samuel Reinhard returns to elsewhere music with “For 10 Musicians,” a four-part ensemble piece recorded in 2025 at the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen. In each movement, two pianists are assigned a single chord and asked to repeat it at a pace of their choosing for the duration of the piece. Between repetitions, the pianists play a short figure improvised from a set group of notes. They are joined by wind and string players—two clarinets, two bass clarinets, two violas, a cello, and a double bass—who choose and play individual notes from that same group. As in Reinhard’s previous work, the players are instructed to play as quietly as they can while still producing a sound, and are invited to take extended breaks, playing as much or as little as they would like within their assigned duration.
“For 10 Musicians” sees its ensemble unfurling what Reinhard calls his “non-directional” music with restraint and a keen sense of absence as a source of form. Reinhard and his players approach the veil between sound and silence, weaving music from sound on the brink of its nonexistence. Harmonic development is left largely to chance; notes accumulate and recede like indeterminate streaks of fading light marking a dark sky or small disturbances in a still body of water, sometimes pooling or dissolving together into quiet texture. Each movement constitutes a totality whose sense of stillness is colored in by subtle internal changes. Throughout, repetition is the architecture through which the music approaches a state of rest.
Performers: Paul Jacob Fossum (piano), Gintė Preisaitė (piano), Vincent Yuen Ruiz (bass), Nicole Hogstrand (cello), Pauline Hogstrand (viola), Mika Persdotter (viola), Carolyn Goodwin (bass clarinet), Anders Banke (bass clarinet), Francesco Bigoni (clarinet), Henriette Groth (clarinet)
