Helena Winkelman in an interview

"Life and composing are inextricably intertwined."

Helena Winkelman is considered one of the most interesting and versatile musical personalities in Switzerland.

In addition to her award-winning work as a soloist and chamber musician, she has been composing since her year of study in New York (1998), and her works are now performed all over the world – by ensembles including the Arditti Quartet, Steamboat Switzerland, Ensemble Phoenix, and the Munich Chamber Orchestra.

Her output encompasses all genres, from solo pieces and chamber music to choral and orchestral works. She is published by the Swiss publishing house Editions BIM.

She has been invited to the Young Artists in Concert Festival in Davos (2001–2005), the Open Chamber Music Festival of the IMS in England (1996–2013), the Bastad Festival in Sweden, and the Ernen Music Festival (Composer in Residence), and has performed with Thomas Demenga , Hansheinz Schneeberger, Werner Bärtschi, Xenia Jankovich, Christoph Richter, Dana Ciocarlie, Erich Höbarth, Lucas Niggli, and other renowned soloists.

You come from a family of musicians and received your first violin lessons at the age of 5. What are your memories of those early days?

Interestingly, my first musical object of desire wasn't the violin. When I was three years old, I desperately wanted to play the trumpet—I especially loved the brilliant sound of the high Bach trumpets I heard in cantatas. My parents, however, initially gave me only a recorder.
When I later told the great trumpeter Reinhold Friedrich about this early childhood frustration, he laughed and said, "As a child, I wanted to fly to the moon—and my parents put a ladder in the garden for me."
So those were my humble beginnings.
Just as important as the Baroque music in my parents' house (my father is a flautist and flute maker, my mother a harpsichordist) was the influence of my grandparents. My maternal grandfather was an architect, an enthusiastic amateur violinist, and (along with my grandmother) a groupie of the great Russian violinist David Oistrakh. They followed him all over Europe, and even when he was in a nursing home in his eighties, Grandfather would start to cry whenever I told him about Oistrakh. Those must have been the happiest moments of his life.
I only recently learned that my paternal grandfather, who died young, also played the violin. He was a Dutch journalist and war correspondent.

Your violin studies in New York also marked the start of your composing career. How did you get into composing?

I always knew there was something else besides the violin that would give me more opportunities to be creative. At first, it was comics and cartoons, then poetry—but those were just detours, because for quite some time I simply didn't have the fundamental music theory needed for composing.
I had improvised since early childhood, as I was fortunate enough to have Edwin Villiger as a violin teacher, who taught according to the Kodály school, where improvisation is an integral part. But notating music was incredibly tedious for me.
After my studies in Lucerne and then my gap year in New York, however, that changed, as I finally possessed the necessary music theory knowledge.
New York was particularly important because the city has a youthful spirit, where everyone is searching for the new and exciting, and failure isn't a disgrace. You simply get back up and keep going. I felt much less burdened there by the great compositional models of old Europe, and so I was really able to start composing there.

I remember that the year before, when I was still playing in the Mahler Youth Orchestra, I asked our conductor, Claudio Abbado, whether I should study in Vienna or New York.
He didn't give me direct advice, but simply told me the following: "The Vienna Philharmonic once asked me for a recommendation for an open harp position. I recommended the best player I knew. They responded with the following objection: She's a woman, and she's Black."
Perhaps things are better in Vienna in that respect today—but back then, I knew I wanted to study in New York. I spent a lot of time in the jazz clubs there, and my music is still rhythmically and harmonically influenced by them.
I still remember a wonderful incident on the subway. I was sitting there with my violin, and a young African American man sat down next to me. He asked, "What have you got here?" I replied, "My violin." He asked, "You study music?" I replied, "Yes." He laughed and said, "That's great. You've got to give it all you've got." This short exchange still motivates me today. I give music everything I have.

You have received many composition commissions. Do you have free rein in each case, or are your clients' wishes expressed beforehand?

The most frequent request concerns a specific duration. Or there's a need for a particular cast.
Sometimes I also ask a performer what their fantasies are and what kind of piece they'd like. But mostly I simply observe my clients until I know what they're particularly good at, what their character traits are, and where their strengths lie in expression and technique. Dante already said at one point in his major work, the Divine Comedy, that when he wants to communicate something to people, he tailors his garment to the fabric. That is, he adapts his style and content to the recipient of his speech. That this is also my approach to composing isn't a limitation for me; it's a freedom—it gives my imagination direction. And when I'm writing for performers I greatly admire, the inventing flows so easily that I can hardly keep up with notating.
That's why I had such a hard time composing during the lockdown. Everyone thought we composers had it easy because we could simply continue working. But at least in my case, it simply didn't work. I missed the encounter with the genius of my musicians far too much.

Your works are now performed all over the world. Which of your own compositions is your personal favorite and why?

Probably Canto 33, the great vocal work on the final canto of Paradise from Dante's Divine Comedy.
In it, I attempted, with 18 solo voices and three instruments, to set to music the end of Dante's great journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and to penetrate with music into realms where language is no longer sufficient (as Dante himself laments several times in this canto). I wrote the first part of the hour-long work while still a student—greatly inspired and with a fair amount of naiveté regarding the magnitude of the task. The sections of "Canto 33" written at that time are very powerful—but I couldn't finish the last third of the text.
At the time, I thought that this part of Christian mysticism and medieval philosophy was simply too unfamiliar to me to set to music. But perhaps I simply lacked the necessary life experience.
Dante only reached Paradise after passing through Hell and Purgatory—not because he had to earn it, but because he was meant to experience the entirety. And as the great explorer he was, this was surely his own greatest desire.
It took seven years after I performed the first part of Canto 33 for my diploma project with young singers from the Basel Academy of Music in 2007, until I was able to complete it. And those years were, in many ways, both Hell and Purgatory for me, and I learned a great deal about what it means to hit rock bottom.
These experiences reinforced my early conviction that life and composition are inextricably intertwined. When I'm writing, everything that happens to me during that time informs me about the piece—where it wants to go, what it wants to say. And conversely, the piece also determines what happens in my life during that time. They are astonishing synchronicities.
That's why the concept of chance is very foreign to me, and if someone tells me that everything happens without reference or connection, then that's incomprehensible to me based on my own experiences.
This was especially true of another of my major works: "The Omnipotent Tube," a music theater piece with texts by Adolf Wölfli, which I wrote for Steamboat Switzerland and a small acting ensemble.

How do you create a composition?

Usually, it starts with an extramusical theme. Once I've clarified this, I often go for a walk with a small notebook and jot down all the motifs that come to mind. Without self-criticism—like a child.
At home, I then sit down at the piano and begin to harmonize these motifs. I examine these little personalities and consider their strengths. Some convey a call to action, others lend themselves to slow, drawn-out developments, some are disruptive, others great comforters. Depending on their characteristics, I know where they can play a role in the dramatic structure of a composition, and I place them there. Sometimes they are even crucial to the dramatic structure.
The instrumentation usually comes about by itself. I never have to think about it for long. My many years of orchestral experience almost always tell me how to combine the instruments. Only when I have to write for wind bands do I lack the experience and have to seek advice.

What, in your eyes, characterizes a good work?

The relationships between the elements used. For me, the first movement of a Haydn string quartet is infinitely more complex (and by that I mean richer) than a piece by Ferneyhough. One can, of course, say that the number of elements used and their nature determine the complexity of a piece of music. But if these elements can no longer be related to one another, then the result in sound and development is a dreary gray. How often have I observed in my own work: if I want complex relationships, then I have to reduce the number of elements and use simpler building blocks. Often, this means that the surface doesn't even look that complex.
As an extramusical parallel, one could say: the relationships within a family are infinitely richer and more prone to drama than the anonymous coexistence of the collective in a large city. And they are therefore much more interesting for a reflection on human nature in art and psychology.
Another factor in a great composition, for me, is that the means of expression used correspond to the core of the message and can make the latter directly and sensually understandable to the listener. But that presupposes that this core even exists.
It certainly reflects our times that we think more about form than about message. It's—to put it somewhat provocatively—a catwalk mentality. We describe a beauty queen's leg length, the circumference of her breasts down to the centimeter—but we no longer ask what constitutes the mystery, the ineffable charisma of this woman. How different the atmospheres of a Marlene Dietrich and a Marilyn Monroe feel! Perhaps only a brilliant director or poet can portray that. I once received a valuable lesson when—then a bit younger—I spent a night on London buses because I didn't have money for a hotel. I was sitting with a middle-aged guy from some Caribbean island. We talked. I said I was a musician. He replied: "Every music needs a message. What is your message?" He started to sing. Just like that, on the bus. He was completely drunk—but he sang with a magnificent voice.

And his question was a good one. You'd hardly ever be asked that at a music academy. There, it's mainly about objective quantities, because an academy is committed to scientific thinking. But actually, that's a sad reduction of music's true sphere of influence.
When I visited the Roehrich Museum in New York in 2018, I saw him depict religion, music, and science as three circles. For me, these partially overlap: some aspects of music can be grasped scientifically, others are religiously motivated—but some aspects are unique to music itself.

They have also played concerts in retirement homes, prisons, schools for the blind, and rehabilitation centers. What was that like for you? Can you tell us about it?

Those were very important experiences. At the time, I was one of the musicians in the organization Pro Musicis, which had been founded in Paris over 50 years earlier by a Franciscan priest named Père Merlet. He was an organist and one day received the calling to connect young musicians at the beginning of their careers with people who would otherwise never have the opportunity to hear classical music. So we were each given the chance to play a concert in a major concert hall like Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall or the Salle Cortot – always in combination with two concerts in social institutions.
I remember one concert at the Centre Phénix in New York. It was a rehabilitation center for drug addicts. We played for about 150 people, under heavy guard. In addition to a Brahms and a Beethoven sonata, we also played a new work for violin and piano of mine. It was called "Fallen from the Mountain" and was dedicated to a colleague who had had an accident in the mountains. I asked our audience – without mentioning the title – what they thought the piece was about. And they actually figured it out. The people there were certainly among the most sensitive and attentive listeners I've ever played for.
I've always enjoyed making music for people with physical and mental disabilities. I was a little apprehensive about a concert in a prison in Marseille – but that went well too, and I had a good exchange with the social worker there, who is a great humanitarian and interacts with the inmates every day without judgment.

What are your next goals and projects?

I'm currently working on a solo piece for a Korean haegeum player. It's an instrument very similar to the Chinese erhu. I love its sound and its wide expressive range. I've already explored this wonderful ancient musical tradition in a previous work for the Asian Art Ensemble in Berlin.
In March 2022, I'll be writing a piece for a larger ensemble that brings together jazz musicians and early music specialists: MINIMAL MINIMA. Then my trumpet concerto, ICAROS, will be released.

What passions do you have besides music?

I probably would have studied philosophy or psychology if I hadn't become a musician. Perhaps I did, in a way—but not through academia. East Asian cultures have interested me from the very beginning. I first encountered Tibetan Buddhism at the age of thirteen, then came Zazen, I practiced Aikido for a while, but then switched to Qi Gong because of the risk of injury. All of this was to better understand one of the foundations of our art—movement: Why can some great conductors slow down the perceived flow of time with a single gesture? Why is the rhythmic pulse of some great performers so compelling?
I also wondered how it's possible for a performer to truly serve the work and how a space can be created between performers and listeners in which a genuine encounter can take place.
These are all questions that can't be answered solely within the realm of music.

In 2008, I came into contact with the medical teachings of the Lakota (a Native American tribe) and studied with a teacher in England for five years. I then expanded my studies with a diploma in hypnosis, as I was interested in the Western approach to the boundaries of consciousness.
I wanted to know more about the origins of music; I wondered how to achieve the greatest intensity in a performance and tried to understand the source of its magical quality, for which a drum and a whistle are all that's needed.
When Native Americans pick up a drum, they know they can bring a reality into being and therefore consider their inner state while playing. They return to the point where the sound truly recreates the world.
In contrast, a famous violinist colleague from the same country, when asked what he thought about while playing, answered: How much he would earn from the concert, what he would eat afterward…
A big difference, isn't it?

Exploring such ideas in peace isn't easy, because so much has become so loud and commercial today. Always searching for the next big thrill – and refusing to acknowledge how empty everything has become – that's a game classical music cannot and should not play.

However, I think that some things haven't gone ideally in the development of new classical music, and that there's definitely a reason why it often has to search for its audience today.
But we have the chance to rediscover it at every moment, to reinvent it, and I personally still believe that the audience recognizes when someone on stage is giving something of value.
I also see that this is a genuine concern for many young colleagues. That gives me hope.

Interview by Florian Schär | Classicpoint.net | March 15, 2021

Next concerts

April 30th, 2026 - Fata Morgana - Camerata Variabile
May 1st, 2026 - Fata Morgana - Camerata Variablee
May 2nd, 2026 - Fata Morgana - Camerata Variablee
May 3rd, 2026 - Fata Morgana - Camerata Variablee
June 25th, 2026 - Sandcastles - Camerata Variablee
06/26/2026 - Sandcastles - Camerata Variabile
06/27/2026 - Sandcastles - Camerata Variablee
06/28/2026 - Sandcastles - Camerata Variablee