A 2015 Composers’ Prize Winner at the Ernst Siemens Music Foundation. A simple melody, well-formed and self-contained, is to be played ‘with utter calm and exquisite tone’, and yet something seems to be amiss. An ensemble for new music, that plays standing up, like an early music group. A simple, incessantly repeated rhythmic model, but its regularity always threatens to lose its balance. Confounding moments such as these are ubiquitous in the music of Birke J. Bertelsmeier, indeed, she positively seeks them out: they reveal the composer's fascination with controlled imperfection and calculated approximation. In folklich (2012), a piece that not only alludes to folk music in its title, the musicians are up on their feet, so that they can bring across their soloistic presence and the musical energy of the piece to the listeners. The fact that they also happen to use their feet to bring forth noises specified in the score is a further source of bemusement.