A grand assembly! Under the direction of Rebecca Lenton, amateurs and professionals come together to form a special large ensemble: the Berlin amateur ensemble KNM campus ensemble has invited guests from the United Kingdom and the Netherlands to join them in forming the CoMA Allcomers Orchestra. They are joined by members of the Tutti Quanti Orchestra of the Musikschule Fanny Hensel, supported by the professionals of Ensemble KNM Berlin. At the centre of the programme stands a new commission by Klangwerkstatt Berlin from Petros Ovsepyan for amateur ensemble. Also featured are world premieres of the prize-winning pieces from the composition competition Composing for and by all 2025 and a collective composition by the KNM campus ensemble. The KNM Campus Days embody a participatory understanding of music that has shaped Klangwerkstatt Berlin since its beginnings under Peter Ablinger. Two of his compositions are performed in memory of the composer, who passed away in April of this year.

The professional Ensemble KNM Berlin founded the KNM campus ensemble fourteen years ago as its own educational strand. In it, adult amateur musicians develop and create works of new music under the professional direction of flautist Rebecca Lenton, together with further members of Ensemble KNM Berlin. Such an ensemble is unique in Germany. CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) is an international network for amateur new music ensembles, uniting more than 20 ensembles from across Europe. As part of the KNM Campus Days 25, Klangwerkstatt Berlin and the KNM campus ensemble, together with the professionals of Ensemble KNM Berlin, are welcoming a CoMA Allcomers Orchestra to Berlin for the fifth time since 2016.

Marco Wedel: (Gem(ein)sam)keiten (2025)
(Gem(ein)sam)keiten is a piece about proximity and distance — about sounding together, drifting apart, and the fragile negotiation in between. It investigates how togetherness can emerge through listening, imitation and attention; how individual forms of expression dissolve into collective resonance — or resist it. The score prescribes no outcomes. Rather, it opens a space of situations and possibilities that must be shaped by the participants. It trusts in their alertness, their willingness to listen, to respond, to lead and to be led. Throughout the piece, the ensemble continually reorganises itself — physically as well as sonically — forming and dissolving shapes, drawing closer, moving apart again and responding to one another. Across four sections, an arc unfolds that leads into a moment of deep presence and shared silence. The ensemble moves between states of stillness, encounter, pulse, dissolution and gathering — not unlike social bodies and communities that must repeatedly reinvent what it means to be together. Each performance thus becomes a negotiation of the present. Each sound asks: how do we belong to one another?
Marco Wedel

Brian Ledwidge Flynn: Perpetual Motion (2025)
The four groups, with open instrumentation, are each assigned concentric cycles of rhythmic material. The performers are invited to freely select, at each cycle, a note from a given tone cluster corresponding to their group. The incommensurability of the different cycle lengths evokes a sense of parallax and depth of field, while the superimposition of the selected pitches and impulses occasionally generates floating melodies and drifting textures that are unique to each performance.
Perpetual Motion is part of a series of "Single Page Scores" by Ledwidge Flynn, in which concise notation can lead to a potentially endless, unique yet similar work.
Brian Ledwidge Flynn

Max Wilson: A Vision Port (2025)
The name Vision Port derives from a partial anagram of the word "improvisation" and reflects the balance between freedom and form that characterises this work. By combining traditional and graphic notation, it guides the performers through evolving textures and rhythmic interactions. The musicians observe a clock, synchronising at key moments and emphasising its ticking. At the end, the notes converge into a clock face, creating a final gesture that unites music and time.
Max Wilson

Petros Ovsepyan: Why fum'th in Fight (2025)
The title of the piece is taken from the short hymn by Thomas Tallis from 1567, based on a psalm text (Psalm 2:1–2) by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Matthew Parker.

Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout?
Why tak'th in hand the people fond, vain things to bring about?
The Kings arise, the Lords devise, in counsels met thereto,
against the Lord with false accord, against His Christ they go.

The text forms the resonance and echo space underlying the piece Why fum'th in Fight. The work reflects our conflict-ridden times, in which only extremes seem to remain. The tape recording from Linum, a village in Brandenburg where over 70,000 cranes gather each October before continuing their southward migration, contrasts the peaceful sounds of animals living in harmony with nature against the destructive noise of cars on the adjacent country road.
The crane is, in Armenian culture, a symbol of the overcoming of borders and the longing for one's place of origin.
The piece was composed for the KNM campus ensemble and has a flexible instrumentation, allowing the number of performers to vary from performance to performance.
Petros Ovsepyan

Peter Ablinger: WEISS/WEISSLICH 3 (1990)
… The name of the series Weiss/weisslich therefore refers not only to the subtle difference between white and another white, but above all to the difference between white and the perception of white. In the case of the piece that gave the series its title, the later Weiss/weisslich 3, the process of transposition was most immediate — perhaps the most direct and simple in all of my work: once again I stood before a painting and thought of music. This time in 1990, at the Gropius-Bau in Berlin, one of those enormous exhibitions of the period — I have forgotten the theme, but I remember having only just begun the exhibition, starting with the last room of the tour. And there I stood before a painting consisting solely of vertical, light-grey stripes, nothing but two different shades of grey alternating with complete regularity. I was less contemplating the painting than it was contemplating me, as I stood before it lost in thought for a while, before abruptly ending my visit to the exhibition and going home to sketch a piece consisting of nothing other than the repeated, regular alternation of 40 seconds of silence and 40 seconds of near-silence. It was many years later that I finally discovered the painting was by Agnes Martin.
Peter Ablinger

Pauline Oliveros: Tuning Meditation (1971)
Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016) is known for her participatory works and sound meditations, which are suited to musicians and non-musicians alike, and Tuning Meditation is an example of this form. The score consists of simple text instructions directing participants to sing a vowel for as long as they exhale, to listen to what the people around them are doing, and with their next sung tone either to synchronise or "tune in" with one of the voices they hear, or to sing a tone they do not hear.

Peter Ablinger: A-E-I-O-U (2012)
The piece engages with voiced vowel sounds and their sonic appearance in unvoiced forms, whether through a single voice or multiple voices. It is a kind of sound study of the building blocks of our language — at times gentle, fragile, uncomfortable, unguarded or familiar.
Peter Ablinger

KNM campus ensemble: AUTOMATEN:MENSCH (2024)
In 2024, the KNM campus ensemble collectively composed a piece on the theme of "Automaten:Mensch" (Automata:Human), reflecting in three parts on different kinds of automata and their interactions with humans. In the first part, ChatGPT was instructed to create a short piece for us in text form; the second part is devoted to the various sounds that automata produce; and the final part is a musical tandem between an MRI scanner, its sounds and live music. The piece has been newly arranged by Rebecca Lenton for the CoMA Allcomers Orchestra.
KNM campus ensemble

The KNM Campus Days 2025, as part of Klangwerkstatt Berlin 2025, are a project by the KNM campus ensemble in cooperation with Neue Musik für Alle e.V., Ensemble KNM Berlin, CoMA (Contemporary Music for All) and the Musikschule Fanny Hensel. They are funded by the Landesmusikrat e.V. on behalf of the State of Berlin.