Listening

This Swiss composer's conceptual and practical guide to the mind/body overlap in music and martial arts

Over the past 20 years, Swiss musician and composer Nik Bärtsch (born 1971) has performed around the world and released a number of albums with ECM Records. During this time, Bärtsch also developed a number of practical techniques which not only offer useful tools to musicians and martial artists, but also support, focus and simplify learning and creative processes in other fields of artistic activity as well as in daily life.

Together with his wife, Andrea Pfisterer-Bärtsch, Bärtsch presents Listening, a guide to these techniques, based on the pair’s longstanding experience as aikido practitioners, performers in live music, cultural entrepreneurs and teachers of music and physical techniques. Through essays and pictures, interviews, exercises and games, the book conveys the couple’s poetic understanding of body and mind and inspires readers' individual creativity and consciousness, regardless of their background.