»Pour mon cher frère Joséf«

For violin and viola
Premiere: 1994 in Eisenstadt (Austria), played by Wolfgang Wölfer und Johannes Kostner
Duration: ca. 10 minutes

When I wrote Jeux I in 1976, I was occupied with discovering what distinguishes improvisation from composition. The most diverse influences of playful music-making thus merged together, dance elements and bitonality reflecting the members of Les Six (especially the music of Darius Milhaud) and the effervescent temperament of Leonard Bernstein, a composer who had captivated me during that time.
Despite the clear stylistic borrowings, Jeux I became my first composition in two movements, because until then I had only tried writing shorter pieces; longer pieces still lacked shape and conciseness in the presentation of musical ideas.
Thus this piece became my first official work, and in that respect also had far-reaching consequences, since a sequel that was never fully completed (Jeux II), which presents the outline of a ballet, served as a warehouse of raw material for my eventual composing with intervallic relationships and then harmonic dispositions. Thus the two-movement Jeux I became the germinal cell for my harmonic experiments that have informed all of my music. (January 2016)