Im Januar am Nil (=In January at the Nile) was written in 1981 for Ensemble Koeln - the instrumentation: two soprano saxophones, percussion (five Japanese temple bells, a Korean gong, a crotale, a cymbal, a side drum and a bass drum), a piano, four violins, two cellos and a double-bass. In 1984 the completely revised piece was premiered in Paris by Ensemble Itineraire.

Through the piece runs a constantly repeated melody, increasing both in length and density - new tones appear in the expanding gaps, first in a purely auxiliary function, but gradually harmonically rivalling the older tones. A single note at the start develops into a flowing melody moving from transparent tonality through multitonality to a dense self-destructive atonality.

At first the melody is played almost inaudibly by the bass clarinet, amplified by overtones heard as natural harmonics in the strings: the resultant timbre is phonetic, based on a Fourier analysis of German sentences (as for instance the title itself) containing only harmonic spectra, namely liquids, nasals and semi-vowels. Ideally these "scored Fourier-synthesized" words should be comprehensible, but an ensemble of seven strings can only be approximative. After a few minutes of bass clarinet and strings, the piano enters in an explicit rendition of the melody, developing it as described above and timbrally coloured by "hocketing" soprano saxophones. The double bass now also explicitly plays the melody without further developing it - in a "frozen" state it is contrasted with the piano part and slows down during further repetitions due to its increasing length.

The score was redone with a commercial notation programme in 1993; on hearing the file via MIDI, I found it interesting to make an alternative tape version, using instead of sampled instruments only classical electronic sounds - sine, sawtooth, square and pulse waves as well as filtered white noise. The result is phonetically clearer but timbrally autonomous. In 1999 I also made a video film to match this synthetic realisation. Please see below.