Nikolaus Brass (1949, Germany) was born in Lindau/Lake Constance, Bavaria and lives near Munich as a freelance composer. He studied medicine in Munich, Glasgow, and Berlin and composition with Peter Kiesewetter in Munich and Helmut Lachenmann in Hannover and Stuttgart. Since 1981, his works have been performed at a number of major European festivals of contemporary music. In 2009 he won the Musikpreis der Landeshauptstadt München and in 2014 became a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts. In 2014 his chamber opera Sommertag (A Summer Day), based on a play by Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, was premièred at the Biennale für neues Musiktheater in Munich.

Twombly Music 2 for clarinet, guitar, and accordion (2011) was dedicated to Klara Tomljanović, Uroš Rojko, and Luka Juhart and premièred on 3 July 2014 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.

Orpheus
Apollo and the Artist
Orpheus Remembered
Mars and the Artist
Orpheus Remembered
Intermezzo
Venus
Epilogue 1 and 2

Twombly-music 2 refers to four drawings by US artist Cy Twombly: Orpheus, Apollo and the Artist, Mars and the Artist, and Venus. Four sections of my work bear these titles (in Twombly, Orpheus is almost nothing, a crooked pencil line, a scratch, that’s all), accompanied by two interludes (Orpheus Remembered) and two Epilogues. The interludes and Epilogues are meditations on the archaic and poetic atmosphere of the antique world evoked by the drawings. The vague, sometimes rough, but mostly very understated and subtle movements of Twombly’s pencil and brush inspired me to produce this colourful and varied piece of music.