Michael Quinn: John, I wanted to start with a very basic question, but also fundamental one. Why do you compose?

John Wolf Brennan: Every time you begin a new piece that's the basic question. It might seem like a cliché to state that you start with a blank piece of paper, but it's true. I must confess that I go through hell at the very beginning of every piece. I feel like a mountaineer standing in front of the Himalaya mountains, asking myself, am I prepared for this; am I fit enough; will I have the endurance to go through the whole process from the beginning to the very end; do I have a clear image of what's going on inside my head? No matter how experienced you are, it's a scary thing to begin with.

MQ: What do you know about the piece when you start? Do you know the end?

JWB: Quite often I know more about the end than the beginning... I usually start with sketches and I have a vague idea of -- what the Italians call -- the drammaturgia. You might translate this with the dramatic songline of the whole piece, the art of the dramatic composition of the main elements. Somehow I "know" how it's going to taste and feel more than its actual topographic shape. And slowly I begin to sense the direction. But there are plenty of bifurcations and question marks, and every time I answer one, a new one crops up. I try to follow my instincts more than prefixed mathematical structures, although I know they are there, lurking in the back of my mind. Music and mathematics share the the same origins -- just think of Pythagoras! At the same time I try to free myself of all these academic rucksacks (which are so heavy you might call them rocksacks!) that we carry around from university and from studying composers we love. I guess I'm trying to avoid the very thinking process at this point, letting "it" flow -- whatever the "it" means, it matters more than I can think of.

MQ: So this is a kind of sculptural notion that you're whittling away to free the shape within.

JWB: Sculptors seem to "see" the finished figure inside the slab of stone, I try to hear the hidden melody inside the rock (this is why I go mountain climbing so often!). It has been there forever, you just have to find and reveal it. I think the compositional process is very similar to re-discovering an artefact. The music doesn't need the composer to exist, it has been there for a long, long time, ever since the stellar dust conversed to solid rock. I see the composer's role in re-discovering the hidden treasures and sleeping beauties -- that's the real innovation! Of course, to some extent, this definition of "archaeologist of the present age" makes terms like "avant-garde" or "arrière-garde" obsolete.

MQ: You're very active as a performer as well -- how does that influence you as a composer? If you weren't a performer, would you be a different kind of composer?

JWB: Ideally the two professions (which are actually one) can help each other. The composer can learn a lot from the performer, and the other way around. Let's take the example of what happened in my second opera "Night.Shift", which was first performed in 2007 in St. Gallen. I wrote a very challenging part for timpani, so I went to see the timpani player, who showed me all his tricks with the pedals and mallets and different stroke techniques on his five kettle drums. I went home thinking, okay, so he knows a lot about his instruments, but there might be more to find out. This resulted in a kind of ping pong game. Every time I went to his rehearsal room with sketches of a new part, he'd look at it, saying "but this is impossible!". My question "why?" he'd answer with "because you can't move your foot from here and in no time to there". After trying several unorthodox ways, a little while later he found, "oh maybe if I put my foot here and I just moved around a bit, it could work!" Sometimes the composer asks for the impossible, and the performer finds new ways to make it possible. This is how evolution happens -- the "impossible" becomes a new standard, ready to be challenged by the next generation.

MQ: So is that the appeal of jazz for you? You're active in many kinds of music, but jazz seems to be one of the centres. Is it because of its freedom or quality of improvisation?

JWB: It's a long story and a never ending love for jazz. I have great respect for musicians like McCoy Tyner, Bill Evans or Chick Corea, but I would only hesitantly call myself a jazz pianist in the traditional sense of the word. On the one hand, jazz is definitely a very distinguished and accomplished art form, and it is certainly true that its roots grew in America. On the other hand, there are a lot of important and influential European players, but the origins of the whole style were in the United States. There is a cultural issue there, even a kind of "clash of cultures". I remember Anthony Braxton telling me in an interview that he stopped calling his own music "jazz" because of what he called "the reverse racism" that Wynton Marsalis and others kept on boasting about, that jazz exclusively is supposed to be "The Classical American Music of the 20th Century", so how dare we whitees and Europeans think we can play it. Of course we could turn the tables and find definitions and parameters of a genuine European jazz style, but why bother... You might be called a "jazz pianist" only because you use elements of improvisation, so you're automatically associated with "jazz". But improvisation is a tradition which was an essential part of the European classical and folk music for many, many centuries. Only in the late 19th and the 20th century did this tradition get lost. So I prefer to say I'm just a pianist, forgetting about the boundaries. I guess you can call it "dancing on the razor's edge, or hiking on the ridge" -- the German word is "Gratwanderung".

MQ: I was interested in how jazz influences other parts of your life, particularly your composing.

JWB: It certainly influences my general approach to music, directly to the heart of the matter, because jazz has a direct and radically innocent approach to the material. You take a small, tiny element and start to play with it like a child with a Lego brick. I found this spontaneous, unbiased approach to be a huge relief while studying at the university and trying to get the whole weight of European music history into my little head. All of a sudden I heard musicians from South Africa, merging with urban musicians from London. Like Chris McGregor's Brotherhood of Breath, an exciting and wild mixture of anarchic discipline and organised chaos. 17 musicians on one stage, presenting more a BIG BANG than a big band! There must have been some kind of secret, "undercover" conducting going on, but I couldn't figure it out. At the same time, it sounded really like free music. This aroused my curiosity. When you feel like a "young lion", revelling in rebellion, and the spirit of revolution is constantly on your mind, then this African-European (con)fusion and confluence had a strong, attractive undertow, like a drag. Till today, this contradiction between the organized chaos and the liberated cosmos continues to fascinate me, and it certainly influences my way of composing. Some years ago, in an interview with Russian television, I came up with the term "comprovisation" to describe this very phenomenon at the seamlines between composition (with the instant freedom of extemporisation) and improvisation (with the highly structured architecture and texture of composition).

MQ: You were born in Ireland and moved to Switzerland at the age of seven.

JWB: Yes. I migrated from Europe to an Extra-European country, finding myself right in the middle of it -- a country connected by countless common bonds to the rest of the world -- but still not a member of the EU.

MQ: You've been talking about jazz and its very definite sense of its own roots, its own heritage. Yet it's geographically rootless in many ways. Is that part of the appeal for you? Did you find something within that?

JWB: Absolutely. The exile situation sharpens the focus. The fish looking at the aquarium from the outside can tell you more about its habitat.

MQ: The dislocation.

JWB: When you're young, you tend not to worry about roots and family and traditions. Tradition, my God! I wanted to leave all this. But then questions came up, how much of the tradition do you have to know in order to overcome it? How much do you have to know about la garde to be avant la garde, or maybe even arriere la garde? And suddenly you discover that avant-garde was actually the name given to the frontline soldiers in Napoleon's army. Do you really want to associate yourself with such a martial metaphor? And about the "home turf"...in Switzerland I felt and still feel quite homeless, not in terms of friends, but in missing the Irish spirit, the crack... I guess music is the strongest and most intense way of trying to re-create a home. I became aware of traditions in the purest form, not only in jazz, but also in folk and classical music. At the same time, my playing was far away from all that, as "far out" as you could possibly get, deeply involved in cutting-edge research, experimenting with the most "avant-garde" elements of music that only consisted of pure noise, on the verge of sheer silence.

MQ: Are you in the refracted world, as experienced by many exiles? In Switzerland you might be considered Irish, and in Ireland, Swiss?

JWB: As a child I felt the impact, the culture shock, but thank God later on I discovered the common roots of Celtic culture for my own work -- Switzerland was, together with Bavaria and Bohemia, the place where the Celtic tribes originated, before Julius Caesar pushed them to the Western edge of the continent. Genetically, the Helvetians constitute the bulk of the Swiss Confederation. On another note: Peter Rüedi, a famous Swiss critic, once stated that "the only worthy position for an artist is between stool and bench", in other words: between the chairs. I settled in the space between quite comfortably. Let's not forget that in modern times, Switzerland lies in the centre of a culturally thriving continent, on the crossroads of at least four very strong traditions: the Italian, French, German and Austrian cultures.

MQ: I'm hearing all of those in your vowel sounds.

JWB: Yeah, I guess that must be the "global brogue"... You have to come to grips with these disparate traditions. At the same time there probably is -- at least in the eyes of an outsider -- something like a "Swiss" identity. It goes deeper than cowbells, watches, chocolate and cheese. If you go and visit the country you'll find out, just how different the people are, open-hearted and close-minded at the same time. Ireland is different and simultaneously it is similar -- every time I come back it has changed. It shouted a big "NO!" to the European constitution, and at the same time it has become very "continental" in many ways of everyday life. At the same time, you could tell the smell of an Irish countryside from a hundred different other smells. Identity and diversity happily co-exist, and that adds to the fragmented perception of modern life. We can't escape it, we have no choice. We live in this fragmented world, and work hard to get back to our roots. We all have to create a home of our own, it's no longer a natural gift which is given to us for free.

MQ: I suppose that helps to accelerate the desire to pursue the adventure of the avant-garde. Or at least, it provides balm for a sense of retaliation.

JWB: When you're in limbo between different worlds, you're striving to find some sort of identity as well as some motivation in the true sense of this word: the motion is the motive which "keeps the rebel going". A lot of my work deals with literature, so frequently I'm asked about Irish literature, questions like "how is it possible that such a tiny country has produced so many great writers, poetic giants like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett?" My answer is a metaphor, not of the melting pot, but of a hot steamer, a pressure cooker, with the Catholic Church sitting on top as the lid. Artists, like Joyce and Beckett, need to let off their creative steam, often oppressed by the clerical (and political) powers. They found their security valve in leaving the island, becoming exiled strangers.

Contrary, if you grow up in a cosy, hedonistic society, in a so-called consumer "paradise", where nothing really seems to matter, and 'anything goes' is your only postmodern philosophy, then there's nothing to fight against. If you are living on the verge of two continental shelves, as it were, you're really striving to find the essence of art, to get to the inner self and discover the adventurous edge "at the end of the rainbow" as a kind of survival kit, because only then you can move on and keep the energy flowing.

You kiss up a word or a sound, and maybe it just consists of one little vowel, and you find consolation in building a tiny little world just for a glimpse of a moment, for five seconds or four minutes and thirty-three seconds, like John Cage. This tiny world might seem fragile and remote to the continental shelf, like the Aran islands off the West coast (or the Immram in the Celtic mythology), but there is always a hidden connection. Maybe the missing link is underneath the surface, reminding us of other hidden tribal links between different cultures, like the Celtic and the Helvetian culture.

MQ: That obviously deep concern you have for discovering and finding alternative histories seems to find expression in your music. In the London magazine "MUSINGS", Richard Cochrane has written that "Brennan's subject is something like the construction of an alternative Irish music". Do you recognise what he means by that?

JWB: When I first read it, some years back, I didn't really know what he meant. But over the last two or three years I'm beginning to understand. I like the technical term "construction", because I'm deeply convinced that music is "techné" in the ancient Greek sense, meaning handicraft, art, skill and science, all in one. This is contrary to the romantic idea, where art happens when you're kissed by an angel or a muse, flying from cloud seventeen down to earth and finding -- of all places! -- your head as (h)airport, and then all of a sudden you're supposed to be "inspired"! I'd rather think of Newton's cradle... Composition is based on mathematical construction, finding the right key elements and taking into account gravity, statics, dynamics, kinetic energy and all the other natural laws as well as aesthetical considerations. Only then has it a chance to truly become mathemagical.

Another technical aspect -- and this goes back to your earlier question about composer and performer -- is the playability of a piece. How can it actually be performed? Maybe there is a perfectly conceived composition in your mind which will never see the light of day, simply because the instruments don't exist yet.

MQ: Describe the process of composing for me. Do you write every piece in the same way? Does there have to be a trigger for the piece?

JWB: The trigger always lies within the piece. When I began to compose, I also studied, applied and adapted mechanical methods like serial or dodecaphonic theories, but after a while I became frustrated with the result. So in my own little evolution, I decided to go for a radically new (which actually is a radically old) approach: to start with a blank piece of paper, no strings attached, and not to be afraid of this vacuum.

MQ: But do you have to be methodical about this? Do you have to set time aside or set yourself aside from everything?

JWB: Like most of us, I need certain pressure. It was a huge consolation when I was working with legends like Ennio Morricone, Edison Denisov, Heinz Holliger, or Klaus Huber, doing master classes in composition with them. Every day, Klaus Huber used to get loads of URGENT fax messages. "Mr Huber, we desperately need your parts!!! The premiere is next week. Where are they?" He would just smile, like a wise monk or even John Cage, point to his head and say, "it's up here!"

In practical terms, I'd very much like to set time aside for composition, but as a family father of three girls, and teaching some 30 piano students every week, this is not an easy task.

MQ: When did you start to compose?

JWB: Well as a child of course, doing all those stupid little exercises. You could probably describe them as "tyranny in some minor major mode, served with false notes".

MQ: Your family background is musical. Your mother Una Wolf-Brennan was a singer.

JWB: So she was, and my father was a very good classical pianist, but he decided to remain a music lover in the true sense of the word: an amateur.

MQ: And one of your uncles, Karl-Ulrich Wolf, was a notable composer.

JWB: Unfortunately, he died very young, back in 1957. But you are right, my family background is very musical, I couldn't help it... I was playing on the "Blüthner" grand piano at home, and my mother was singing the whole repertoire of romantic klavierlieder, songs by Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Hugo Wolf, and then throw in the odd Irish folk song, sometimes in the sentimental arrangements of the time.

MQ: That might have prompted you to be a pianist or a singer.

JWB: I started to play the piano, and then discovered rock music when I was twelve or thirteen, listening to Jimi Hendrix, Sgt. Pepper and the Rolling Stones. I thought they were so much more exciting. So I taught myself to play the guitar and actually played bass guitar in a rock group for many years, but tended to hide that from my parents. At the same time I went to classical piano lessons, and my Hungarian piano teacher introduced me to Béla Bartók. When I discovered pieces like Allegro Barbaro, two worlds finally came together, because the intense motorical hammering of the piano was like playing rock. My teacher tempted me with Bartók's music, luring me back to the the classics. Of course, I didn't say a word to the director of the conservatory about my role as bass player in a rock group, not to speak of my later ventures into jazz and improvised music. To the outside, the two worlds remained quite separated. I don't think my voice is good enough to be a singer, but I did study belcanto singing and conducting, and it's true that a great part of my oeuvre is vocal music. I had the pleasure to work with great singers such as Noëmi Nadelmann, Elisabeth Kulman, Agnes Heginger, Yaniv d'Or, Norma Winstone, Gabriele Hasler, Julie Tippetts, Magda Vogel, Barbara Sutter, Sylvia Nopper, Corin Curschellas, Christian Zehnder, Alexandra Prusa, Linard Bardill, Nadja Räss and many more.

MQ: Was it at the college you started to compose for theatre pieces?

JWB: Yes. I studied in Fribourg, in the French speaking part of Switzerland, and was desperate to make a bit of money. I found writing music for theatre an unexpected blessing for three reasons; (1) you can make a bit of money, (2) you have to work very fast and (3) often you are confronted with the most impossible instrumental combinations. The director might tell you, "Well we have one actress who can sing, but only in a very limited range; one actor who plays the baritone saxophone, but it's broken with only five keys working; plus a percussionist with a broken leg. So there is your list, help yourself, and. by the way. we need the finished music by next Thursday". In other words: you haven't got the slightest chance, so go out and grab it!

There's no better way to gain routine, experience, and endurance. Plus you can finally put all your knowledge of literature, rhymes and rhythms to good use.

MQ: Many people think that academic studies are not a creative thing to do -- rather you should be finding solutions to problems yourself. Making two ends meet in a creative way is presumably what you had to learn at the time.

JWB: Coming from the academic background, there's a constant danger of falling into traps, like trying to be "Stockhausen number two", completely detached from the "real world". You need a more practical grassroot, down to earth "street university" approach (Americans would call it "jazz on the road, man!"), if you want to write for theatre or dance. The actual stage is the world in a nutshell, you have to develop a highly distinguishable dramatic style. You have to work fast and efficiently, getting your ideas across as clear as possible. Also, you have to face the fact that music often takes a back seat in a theatrical or cinematic context, unless you manage to write something genial like the Threepenny Opera or Nino Rota's soundtrack for Fellini movies, where the music actually transcends the context and even prevails.

MQ: But you did actually manage to broaden that secondary role out to a primary role in your work with dance, visual artists and sound installations. Presumably you enjoy the physicality of these forms?

JWB: Quite true. Looking back, there is tremendous energy to be found at the bottom of this physical (or meta-physical) process. You have to overcome many obstacles. It's not a cosy warm hothouse atmosphere like studying in college with a master and then, as his protégé, getting a whole orchestra for free to experiment with. Working in a theatre is a more challenging alley to go down. When I was in my early thirties, I must have written music for about fifty plays, so it was really a substantial output. Of course a lot of it was throw-away music. Paul Hindemith called it "Gebrauchsmusik" (utilty music), music to use and dispose of; Erik Satie called it "musique d'ameublement" (furniture music), but I learnt a lot from it. Sound installations are bit like sonic pictures, hanging somewhere inside from a wall in a hall, or transforming a landscape outside, turning it into a "soundscape". It's more of a physical entity, in that it loses the ephemeral quality of a live concert, where the music comes and goes; it's there to stay for a certain period, and so it has a chance to tinge the walls, stairs, ceilings and floors of a building, the hills, meadows, trees and horizons of a landscape in a more sustainable, highly mysterious, extra-musical way: with the secret energy of sound waves. I often think this is what the ancient druids were doing in their spare time...

MQ: Let's talk about "Wurzelklaenge". This metaphoric title means "sonic roots" -- tell us more about the project.

JWB: Well, the German word is "Wurzelklänge" -- you might translate this expression with "root sounds", "resonant roots" or "sonic roots". Going back to the question of performer and composer, there's a third profession inside a musician. Many of us also teach. Some just teach from time to time, master classes, some of us teach for a living. I like to do both workshops and master classes, but also like to teach, children from the age of six or seven up... My oldest pupil is seventy-eight now. Passing on the little bits and pieces I know about music to the next generation is a joy, but equally there's a whole universe to be learnt by the "master" himself! If a teacher does not remain a student himself, he very soon becomes hopeless at his job.

"Wurzelklaenge" is actually a life-long project going back to several questions, cultural and "agri-cultural", as it were: Where are my roots? How can I find them? and dig them out? How can I help them to grow in the present and future? How can my kids, students and pupils participate in this process of growing music? I started collecting Celtic country dances ever since I was a kid. I set some of these dances to new rhythms, new harmonies, and wrote a lot of new material based on or inspired by these country dances. After putting them aside for many years, I returned to these roots, and now I'm planning to write a whole cycle of books for various instruments, for violin, harp, recorder, flute, choir, and different ensembles, and of course the piano. I'm not afraid to be associated with what Jerome de Bromhead once asked, in an interview for RTE, "are you going to be the Irish Bartók?" At the time, I didn't know what he was talking about, now I have a faint idea. Ireland is an island, far away from avant-garde fashion-shows like Donaueschingen and Darmstadt, with their exclusive claim to 'New Music' (with capital letters!) and the "Frankfurter Schule" ideology. If you'd want to follow this fashion, you need to get away as far as possible from all folk music associations. On the contrary, I feel free to use radical root elements, and to combine them with prepared piano and other contemporary elements, making them as interesting as possible for the new generation, coaching teachers who want to pass them on to their students. Just before I came to Ireland, I had a meeting with a major publisher from Germany, so hopefully the Wurzelklaenge will be published next year -- not just in one book, but in a whole series.

MQ: You mentioned "The Well-Prepared Clavier", which is a solo piano programme and part of the Trilogy of trilogies. Obviously the title is a deliberate choice. Tell us about the project, scheduled to end in 2011. When did it begin?

JWB: Well this takes us back to the family I grew up in, my mother being a singer and my father playing the piano. As a pianist, I really enjoyed accompanying singers and instrumentalists, because I was able to add my colours from the background. The piano can very well be "in front" and a very powerful solo instrument, but I was scared shitless, daunted by the scope of a solo project. In 1983, when I was in the USA for the first time, I studied with great players in the jazz world, like Carla Bley, Karl Berger, Dave Holland and Don Cherry at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, upstate New York. Carla Bley heard me playing, and in her most innocent, easy going American way asked, "why don't you do a real solo project?" I was shocked.

Some years later, after a concert, at two o'clock in the morning, I was sitting together with James Galway in his kitchen and asked him, "I'd like to go to New York to do a solo project. Sitting here won't help, I'll never find the courage to do it. I need a place to stay -- would you happen to know about a flat in New York, maybe even equipped with a piano?" He just smiled and said, "Sure!". The same night, he called an ex-friend of his third wife Jeannie (they're still married!), Vincent Hammond, a classical pianist, about to leave for Aspen, Colorado for six months. Therefore, his flat was free, and I was able to move in his place, 58 West 9th street, near Washington Square. The year was '88, same as the number of keys on a piano, which I took as a good omen. There I wrote the first solo cycle called The Beauty of Fractals. In an artist's life there's only one "first solo album", and I'm still proud of it. It won me critical acclaim and important awards in the art world.

Its success triggered off more (six solo piano albums so far, with "The Speed of Dark" in the pipeline for 2009), but without the "kick in the butt" of the Big Apple I would never have done it in the first place. It's the power of this energetic city that tells you, "okay, so you want to sell hot dogs? Fine. You don't want to sell hot dogs? Also fine. You want to do a solo album? Fine. Just go for it." This maybe naïve, but nevertheless efficient and typical American attitude, the sharp, clear and uninhibited way of attacking your goal got to me, in music and maybe in other things as well.

MQ: So the journey of the composers is to move away from the weight of tradition on your shoulders and the long shadow it casts.

JWB: You neither loosen nor lose your shadows, but you can learn to run.

MQ: I suppose that influences your recent forays into opera, first in 2004, the second in 2007.

JWB: I felt the urge to write for the grand stage many years ago. And in fact its roots lay in theatre music I composed when still being a student. It's actually a development and evolution of these elements, there right from the beginning. But instead of writing for the actress who can't sing and a broken baritone sax and the one-legged percussionist, this time it was for real. "Night.Shift" is scored for a full scale opera, for symphony orchestra with integrated jazz quartet. The libretto was written by Rudolph Straub and is based on "The Age of Anxiety" by W.H.Auden. I very much hope it will be possible to stage this opera in Dublin, and have exchanged ideas with director Dieter Kaegi of Opera Ireland about these plans.

MQ: By contrast there's another piece you're working on which is also based on literature, The Divine Comedy, as seen through the eyes of an Irish painter.

JWB: Samuel Walsh is a visionary artist. The triptych "Divine Cosmody" with "Last inferno", "List in Purgatorio" and "Lost in Paradiso" based on his work will be featured on the next solo piano album, "The Speed of Dark".

MQ: That's presumably a different approach to that text because it's defracted through those paintings.

JWB: It's funny, I think there's a strong hidden link between W.H. Auden and Walsh's interpretation of The Divine Comedy. Maybe it's their sardonic humour, maybe it's the love for the medieval times, because the subtitle of the Age of Anxiety is A Baroque Eclogue. What on earth is an eclogue? It's a shepherd's poem actually. But what exactly does this mean? In The Age of Anxiety? I was lost, silently crying "help, help!" -- but that's exactly what was so endlessly fascinating. Auden is a highly literate man. He could recite the whole of Shakespeare by heart. I think he consciously used a very ancient form of rhyming alliterations and a medieval form of poetry for a highly contemporary, haunting, headline subject; breaking news for these lost "figures in a soundscape", which is the subtitle of the opera "Night.Shift".

MQ: A huge contrast again. Was this another elective affinity, working with Yang Jing, the Chinese pipa player you whom you wrote a piece for pipa and classical guitar trio, called SILK/ST/RINGS?

JWB: This is another (ad)venture making the impossible possible, using obstacles as a challenge rather than as an offence. Yang Jing is one of the foremost Chinese pipa virtuosos. We played together, mostly improvised music, but I was also fascinated by her Chinese tradition. The two poles, pipa on one and classical guitar trio on the other end, demanded a distinctive treatment. In the first movement, the two opposites -- you may call them east/west, or male/female, are mutually exposed. There are many ways how yin and yang can interact, so in the second movement they find a precarious balance, and in the third movement there are a lot of Western guitar techniques that I applied to the pipa and vice versa. Sometimes Yang Jing would say, "this is impossible on the pipa." But in watching carefully how the guitar players were coping with their specific difficulties, she applied some of their classical Western techniques to the pipa, and in true ping pong diplomatic style, the guitar players answered the other way around. So the circle is coherent and actually -- in spite of Einstein's warped space and time -- closes. Sometimes.

Questions by Michael Quinn

Recent recordings:

• pago libre sextet: platzDADA! Dada poetry by Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters, and Daniil Charms, with Agnes Heginger (voc), Arkady Shilkloper (horn), Tscho Theissing (vln), John Wolf Brennan (pno), Georg Breinschmid (b) and Patrice Héral (perc)
  Christoph Merian Verlag ISBN: 978-3-85616-372-3 (2008)
• John Wolf Brennan: Pictures in a Gallery. Solopiano.
  Live in Lucerne and St.Petersburg.
  Leo Records CD LR 464 (2006)
• John Wolf Brennan: Shooting Stars & Traffic Lights. Quintet with John Voirol (sax), Tscho Theissing (vln), John Wolf Brennan (p), Daniele Patumi (b) and Alex Cline (perc).
  Leo Records CD LR 477 (2006)
• pipelines -- live at Lucerne Festival
  with Hans Kennel (tp, alphorn, büchel), John Wolf Brennan (pipe organ), Marc Unternährer (tuba)
  Creative Works Records CW 1043 (2005)
• John Wolf Brennan: I.N.I.T.I. A.L.S.
  - sources along the songlines
  with Urs Blöchlinger (sax), Christy Doran (g), Lindsay Cooper (bsn), Urs Leimgruber (sax), Marco Käppeli (dr), Steve Argüelles (dr), John Wolf Brennan (p) and many others
  Creative Works Records CW 1046/47 (2005),/li>
• MOMENTUM 4 -- Rising Fall
  with Gene Coleman (bcl)), Thomas K.J.Meyer (sss, bass-sax) John Wolf Brennan (p, prepared p) & Marc Unternährer (tuba)
  Leo Records CD LR 373 (2004)
• Triangulation
  with Christy Doran (el & ac g, live electronics), John Wolf Brennan (p, prepared p, organ, keyboards, melodica) & Patrice Héral (perc, cajón, voice, live electronics)
  Leo Records CD LR 440 (2004)
• Zero Heroes -- live in Vancouver
  with Peggy Lee (vc), John Wolf Brennan (p, prepared p) & Dylan van der Schyff (perc)
  Leo Records CD LR 373 (2003)

Audio/video links

Excerpt from SILK/ST/RINGS for pipa and guitar trio on the following video:
www.concertguitartrio.ch/video/index.html

Video excerpt from The Speed of Dark for well-prepared:
uk.youtube.com/watch?v=F-96ItHDY8c

Video excerpt from the opera Night.Shift on Art-TV.ch (St.Gallen 2007):
www.art-tv.ch/380-0-theater-st--gallen--night-shift.html

Web sites:

John Wolf Brennan
www.brennan.ch

pago libre
www.pagolibre.com

The views expressed in this interview are those of the persons concerned and are not necessarily the views of the Contemporary Music Centre.