'Sprechgesänge' – 'Speech Songs' run throughout the program of the first CD in the new 'edition musikFabrik' on WERGO: Voices try out their instrumental possibilities, and instruments savor their vocal potential.

In his 'meditation on the nature of language as sound,' Jonathan Harvey alludes directly to the 'inventor' of the Sprechgesang, Arnold Schönberg. Beat Furrer provides the protagonist of Arthur Schnitzler’s 'Fräulein Else' with several different 'language spaces' – like an encephalogram, he records the oscillations of an interior monologue. Georges Aperghis teaches a clarinet to 'babble,' and Unsuk Chin gives an answer to a question from Georges Perec: What might it sound like to throw rotten tomatoes at singers of the species 'cantatrix sopranica'? In dreamlike fashion, Chin causes multiple musics of various styles and periods to swirl through one another in a furious piece.

The live recordings document highlights from the concert series 'musikFabrik im WDR', with noted soloists such as David Cordier, Salome Kammer and Anu and Piia Komsi, and the conductors Stefan Asbury, Sian Edwards, Beat Furrer and Peter Rundel. Two of musikFabrik’s members, Carl Rosman and Peter Veale, provide evidence of the ensemble’s soloistic qualities.