
Extended Circular Music (2025)
music by Jürg Frey
performed by Manuel Zurria
Produced by Fabio Carboni for Blume Editions
https://www.soundohm.com/product/extended-circular-music-1
Side A (22’27”)
1 - String Quartet n.3 first part (2010-2014) (22’27”)
Side B (23’36”)
1 - String Quartet n.3 final part (2010-2014) (7’34”)
2 – Extended Circular Music #1 (2014) (3’30”)
3 – Extended Circular Music #2 (2014) (2’44”)
4 – Extended Circular Music #5 (2014) (4’36”)
5 – Extended Circular Music #6 (2014) (5’12”)
©Edition Wandelweiser
Recorded and mixed by M.Z.@BigCardo, Catania (2022-2024)
All arrangements by M.Z. under the supervision of Jürg Frey
All tracks performed by M.Z. with flutes, bottles, crystal glasses, harmonica, electronics
Mastering by Bruno Germano @Vacuumstudio, Bologna
Inside Photo by ©Ariele Zurria
At the beginning of composing of any piece, when it is not even clear whether it will become a piece at all, my notes, my melodies, can flow in all different directions. This process of great flexibility applies to everything: durations, registers, instruments... And this process accompanies me even when the piece has already taken on a clearer form. Many things are always possible. A melody for violin is rewritten for drums, a piano piece is reduced to a cello part or a clarinet melody is fanned out for string quartet. This is my way of composing, which likes to be seduced by detours and diversions. I have also occasionally applied this rethinking of music to existing pieces; my most adventurous transformation was probably that of guitar pieces into duos for trumpet and percussion. I think Manuel Zurria has taken on a similar adventure, transforming my music into something that at first you would think: forget it! But through patient trial and error and slow progress, the music is transformed. The sound has changed, the emotions are directed in other areas, even the spirit has changed. And the original remains in a constant dialogue with its transformation.
Jürg Frey
Jürg Frey's music has a thaumaturgic power. It makes me feel good and encourages me to keep going, to never have enough. In Extended Circular Music, I aimed to describe the state of the art, creating not a literal translation from the original, but a free interpretation inspired by the suggestions evoked by the music itself. Where the strings fall short, the flutes take on a rich, harmonic breeze. Where the hair crackles, there is an indefinable dust, more akin to light than sound. Kintsugi is a Japanese restoration technique that emphasizes imperfections rather than hiding them. Following this idea, I sought to transfer this crystalline music into an alternative timbral outfit, highlighting critical points to make them shine in their uniqueness. Eliminating all gestures and digressions, we thus enter this tunnel of wonders and allow ourselves to be carried away, fearlessly, by the noble art of Jürg Frey.
Manuel Zurria


The completed work represents a "conjunction of these two artists" that has "activated a transformative form of experimentalism." These renderings "dance with an airy lightness, humour, and play, imbuing them with a beauty and emotiveness that can be rare within experimental music." They exist as "breaths, carrying the curiosities of life, belonging to no time and all time, to no one and everyone: a human music to be inhaled and pondered, for which the outcome remains unknown." In this liminal space between composition and interpretation, between breath and resonance, Zurria and Frey have created something that transcends the boundaries of experimental music itself, offering what might be called a metaphysical cartography of sound in its most essential form. As Bradford Bailey observes in his penetrating liner notes, "music is rarely a fixed entity," existing instead in a state of perpetual flux, "taking on the influences of its interpreters and performers." This fundamental truth finds its most eloquent expression in the transformative collaboration between Italian flutist Manuel Zurria and Frey, longtime member of the Wandelweiser Group. Where conventional recordings might preserve a definitive version, this release activates what Bailey calls "states of unknowing and continued experimentation," allowing Frey's compositions to evolve into entirely new dimensional territories. The original string quartet and piano works dissolve into breath-carried architectures of sound, where "the original remains in a constant dialogue with its transformation." This is not mere arrangement but ontological metamorphosis - an alchemical process through which crystalline harmonies are reborn as atmospheric phenomena. The metaphysical dimensions of this transformation become clear through detailed analysis of the musical result. Where Frey's original compositions operate through what he calls "basic confidence in the clear and restricted material," Zurria's interpretation activates entirely new perceptual territories. Space holds almost atomic sense of weight against the airy punctuations of timbres, textures, and tones, creating "suspensions of time within which questions and identities posed by instrumentation fade." The Extended Circular Music pieces - each comprising "a small number of bars to be repeated an undetermined number of times" - become organizations of sound that defy being definitive or fixed. Originally scored for different combinations of violin, viola, cello, and piano, these works now exist as pure phenomena of breath and resonance, where "hanging, breath-length utterances dance and intertwine amongst complex harmonic clusters and conjunctions." The philosophical implications of this transformation illuminate a lineage of composers who have moved "away from abstraction and responding to the need to create" something beyond mere technique. Drawing parallels to Morton Feldman's understanding of non-functional harmony, Zurria's approach represents "a transformative form of experimentalism" that activates what Frey calls the "thaumaturgic power" of music - its capacity to heal and transform consciousness itself. The result is "a radical reimagining of ambience: sprawling sonorities and resonances adrift in space, carrying the liberated traces of the work's former incarnations and their truths." In Zurria's interpretation, Frey's String Quartet n.3 becomes something approaching "an organ played in slow motion, its seals leaking," while the Extended Circular Music pieces transform into "glacial chords from a diverse palette of voicings, harmonies, timbres, and tones.

The Best Classical Music on Bandcamp, July 2025
By Peter Margasak · August 07, 2025
The Italian flutist Manuel Zurria is a different sort of virtuoso. Yes, he’s a singular instrumentalist capable of dazzling technical feats; but his ears, imagination, and the studio have allowed him to function like his own orchestra, expertly translating works for other instruments and multiple players into jaw-dropping solo performance. But it’s one thing to overdub multiple parts one by one, and quite another for that transformation to capture the essence of the original. On this remarkable new album he returns to the work of Swiss composer Jürg Frey, including a new version of his String Quartet No. 3. Despite the composer’s malleability and interest in open scores, his string quartets have all been recorded by—and become inextricably connected with—Montreal’s superb Quatuor Bozzini, whose accounts have come to define their sound. Which makes this interpretation even more audacious. Yet Zurria’s meticulous craftsmanship both evokes the gauzy textures of the Bozzini’s while embracing a different timbre—more translucent and liquid, with some biting upper register notes softened by the lows. Chords drift like feathers, whether levitating or slowly descending, each new motion altering the sound in some subtle way. The flute is capable of sounds that a violin can’t produce, so the weightless passage that emerges just before the seven-minute mark is particularly stunning, a kind of sudden shift toward the sleekest wind tunnel imaginable. The album also features adaptation of four pieces in Frey’s “Extended Circular Music” series, which are less wedded to particular instrumentation, but no less satisfying in the hands of Zurria.