©Leonart Studio: Nenad Ivkovic

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Tobias Krebs (*1993) is a Swiss composer and classical guitarist. After having studied from 2012-2017 at the Hochschule für Musik Basel (CH) with Michel Roth (composition) and Stephan Schmidt (classcial guitar), he continued his studies at Det Jyske Musikkonservatorium in Aarhus (DK) with Simon Steen-Andersen, Niels Rønsholdt (both composition) and Frederik Munk Larsen (guitar) in the Master for Contemporary Music. His works include performances for various solo instruments, small and larger ensembles, choir, orchestra and music for theatre.
His pieces have been performed by ensemble recherche, ensemble proton bern, Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Ensemble neuverBand, Concept Store Quartet, Calvino Trio, Gyre Ensemble, Zürcher Kammerorchester, and by soloists such as Marcus Weiss and Pablo Márquez.

As a composer he is interested in working with static layers of inner movement, finding musical material that can maintain the tension for a long time even though there is not much of external interventions from the composer’s side.  As if the music unfolds by itself, requiring an attentive mode of listening. The attempt to find the fragile point of balance between „let it happen“ and „shape it actively“, in order to achieve a state of listening where one becomes more aware of time, sound and space.
Another central aspect of his compositional work is the haptic and associative quality of different kinds of materials, such as wood, stone, skin, metal, glass, etc, which manifests itself in pieces such as Patina, Schiefer, Gneis, Schilf and ambra.

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"....creating a gentle but super-rich texture full of movement, its details constantly changing. It was deeply engrossing, like watching light refracting through and bouncing off a rotating, multi-faceted, glassy object, ranging from harmonic coherence to wild tonal ambiguity."

quotation from 5against4 on "Fries"