Mathis Nitschke

21/02/2026

In the final days of a theater production, the guest artist loses his play. It is not taken from him. But it begins to belong to the theater.

During rehearsals, you are the epicenter. Then the house takes over. You are no longer involved in processes and decisions. That is as it should be. Otherwise, there would be no repertoire structure.

And yet a lingering sadness remains. As a guest, you never fully belong. You are more like a bumblebee than a family member.

Tonight is the premiere of KASSANDRA at the Theater Bielefeld. Much of myself is in it. Tomorrow I leave. The play remains.

Photos: Joseph Ruben Heicks

25/01/2026

Ja, ja, Bielefeld gibt’s nicht. Und Bielefeld gibt’s eben doch. Ich kann’s euch versprechen: Ich bin hier. Und zwar auch noch die nächsten vier Wochen.

Am 21. Februar bringen wir KASSANDRA von Christa Wolf auf die Bühne. Mit Christina Huckle als Kassandra, in der Inszenierung von Nadja Loschky, die hier auch Intendantin ist, in der Fassung von Yvonne Gebauer und Nadja.

Und natürlich – ja – die Musik ist von mir konzipiert. Aber nicht nur von mir, sondern vor allem von meinem Kompositionspartner Stefan Behrisch.

Und eigentlich ist das Ganze sowieso eine Teamarbeit: Mathis Mayr am Cello, improvisierend durch den Abend, verbindend; Jörg Hüttner im Kompositionsteam für alles, was Synthese und elektronische Klangräume angeht; und zusammengehalten wird das Ganze von unserer großartigen musikalischen Leiterin Anne Hinrichsen.

Unser Stück wird kein klassisches Schauspiel und kein klassisches Musiktheater. Es ist ein Schauspielmonolog mit Orchester und Chor. Also genau so ein Format, das im Theaterbetrieb eigentlich nicht vorgesehen ist – oder zumindest nicht wirklich.

Als Nadja mich gefragt hat, ob ich das machen will, hatte ich große Vorbehalte. Nicht, weil ich keine Lust hatte – im Gegenteil. Ich träume seit Jahren davon, Schauspiel und Musiktheater wirklich zusammenzubringen. Aber ich weiß eben auch, wie unterschiedlich diese beiden Sparten funktionieren, organisatorisch, strukturell und mental.

Und dann kam ich hierher zu den ersten Gesprächen und fand ein Haus vor, das man nicht umsonst mehr als einmal zum Theater des Jahres gewählt hat. Ich habe ziemlich schnell verstanden, warum.

Die Leute hier haben Lust, etwas zu machen. Sie murren nicht, dass es keine gebundene Partitur gibt, sondern nur eine Loseblattsammlung. Alle wissen, dass das Vorhaben Risiken birgt. Und alle haben Bock, genau dieses Risiko einzugehen.

Die Proben laufen seit zwei Wochen. Ich war zwischendurch wieder 10 Tage in München. Und ab morgen beginnt der Endspurt: vier Wochen bis zur Premiere.

Ich freu mich drauf. Sehr.

https://www.buo-bielefeld.de/theater/veranstaltung/kassandra

25/01/2026

From internal architecture to external reality – a short update on CORPUS and the year ahead.

Last week, our core team met in Munich for a strategic workshop – something we had postponed for too long. As a fully remote team, these moments of shared physical and conceptual space are essential to align direction, priorities, and assumptions.

We began by reconstructing what 2025 actually produced. For some newer team members, much of this history was new. From there, the discussion moved to a more concrete question: what 2026 must deliver.

2025 was about building the platform: technically, conceptually, and organisationally. 2026 will be about exposing CORPUS to reality: users, partners, constraints, and applications.

We are already in concrete conversations with industry partners, particularly in the automotive sector, who want to deploy adaptive, generative sound systems but currently lack solutions that are both technically viable and legally robust. This gap is precisely where CORPUS operates.

From March onwards, the CORPUS community platform will be publicly accessible. The goal is to invite musicians to contribute to a diverse, legally compliant, and semantically structured music library.

In parallel, we are working with catalogue holders who are willing to integrate their repertoires into our licensing framework – an important signal of trust. On this basis, a corpus of well over 100,000 tracks could emerge in the coming months.

On this foundation, the community can grow – and with it, an infrastructure for music that connects expressive richness with technical robustness and legal clarity.

2026 will be a year of testing what CORPUS can actually become.

14/12/2025

7
Background subtlety is at least as demanding as foreground effects.

Last Friday, the new production of "Cabaret" premiered at the Residenztheater Munich. I was responsible for the sound compositions. By that I mean the sound in the moments between the songs – the material that connects the numbers without becoming a song itself.

For these in-between spaces, director Claus Guth introduced a term I find very accurate: “guided silence.” A sonic layer that keeps the ear alert and receptive, preparing the next song without anticipating it.

The production is set in a modest hotel in an American city in the 1980s. This comes with a naturalistic sound layer: the city outside, the building itself, dripping pipes, distant noises. Running alongside this, almost constantly, is a musical layer – sustained chords, isolated tones, minimal tensions. Music that does not want to be music, but still carries the scene.

The work constantly moves between music and non-music, between atmosphere and structure. What the audience experiences as subtle is, in practice, highly detailed work. These backgrounds are often assumed to be easy. They are not. When they don’t fit, when something is off, you notice immediately – and then they do more harm than good.

Second performance is tonight. Further dates are on the Residenztheater website. Link in the comments.

Congrats to the whole team and cast! A fantastic production.

15/11/2025

You work digitally for a long time — abstract, in your head.
And then suddenly you stand in a room, hear music, see people, and realize the idea has become real.
That was CORPUS LIVE.

Here’s the aftershow video.
More impressions and thoughts are in the journal. (https://journal.crps.ai/corpuslive)

21/10/2025

“Here time becomes space,” said Richard Wagner in Parsifal. And Bernd Alois Zimmermann, in the context of his composition Die Soldaten, spoke of the spherical shape of time. Since my student days, I’ve been occupied with this thought – that music, as an art form of time, might transform into an art form of space.

What if music were no longer time – with a beginning, an end, and a development in between – but a space one can enter, move within, explore, a space that changes through one’s own activity?

At some point I came to the conclusion that this openness, this flexibility – the quality such a musical space would need – can really only be achieved through generative AI models. That’s where my interest in working with AI began, and ultimately, that’s where the idea for CORPUS came from.

For me, CORPUS is an attempt to make such spaces possible: spaces that change when you enter them, that respond, that move with the experience.

This idea is also taken up by Tetra Brass and Felix Kolb. In their sound installation and concert performance at CORPUS LIVE, they will create a musical space between 6:00 and 7:30 pm.

A space defined by the brass quartet — two trumpets and two trombones — and by sustained sound textures from Felix Kolb that connect the pieces. Not a classical concert with applause breaks and coughing interdictions, but an open space of experience that you can enter and leave freely.

You’re welcome to come from 6:00 pm. The installation will be running; we can talk, have a drink, some food — and you can experience this sonic space.
At 7:30 pm, the official part begins.

Monday, 27 Oct 2025 · Schwere Reiter, Munich · Free Entry

20/10/2025

In this small book, Matthias Hornschuh manages to take apart the current developments around AI – not just critically, but with solid reasoning. He connects them to a larger question: what this actually means for us as a society, and what’s at stake for our cultural survival.

He doesn’t just point out what’s going wrong, he reminds us why we make art in the first place. That art is a place one can live in. _That’s_ something worth living for.
This book brought me back to why I do what I do: I make art to create a world in which I can exist (as the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said to me).

At CORPUS LIVE, Hornschuh will open the evening at 7:30 p.m. with his keynote “Fairness in the Creative Industries: Overcoming Structural Asymmetries and the Struggle for a Level Playing Field.”
How does fairness work in an industry already full of asymmetries, even before AI?
How do legacy rights systems function – and what happens when AI accelerates those distortions?

After his keynote and our presentation of the CORPUS ecosystem, we’ll open a discussion on the difference between the fast production of a creative product and the actual process of creation itself — between text production (with or without AI) and the process of writing. Or, for us musicians: between music production and the process of composing.

I’m very glad he’s joining us.
Monday, 27 Oct 2025 · Schwere Reiter, Munich · From 18:00 · Free Entry

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09/10/2025

Music AI began as an artistic experiment — and ran into a wall of bad data, bad rights, and no trust.

CORPUS was born from that frustration: a protocol where musicians stay in control, originality is rewarded, and consent is the rule.

On 27 Oct, we launch not a platform, but a signal — that music’s future with AI can still be built on integrity.

05/07/2025

Don Giovanni, Festival d’Aix-en-Provence 2025
Director: Robert Icke · Conductor: Sir Simon Rattle · Premiere: July 4

I was the sound designer on this production – and honestly unsure whether I should do it. Don Giovanni is tightly composed; interrupting that flow is risky. And with a star conductor, there's always the chance your work gets cut in the end.
What convinced me: Simon Rattle was present from day one. And not just open – he brought in wild ideas himself. We tried everything. No egos, no power games. Just focused work.
In the end, the sound design holds up. It fits with the Mozart without getting in the way. Maybe a small step toward expanding opera’s sonic vocabulary – not more cinematic, just more present.
And one thing stays with me: a good idea isn't enough. You have to work through it – doubt, pressure, resistance. Only then does it gain weight.

Don Giovanni: Andrè Schuen
Il Commendatore: Clive Bayley
Fotos: Monika Rittershaus

17/06/2025

CORPUS is here — a new project for anyone who believes that the future of music should be shaped with artists, not against them.

I’ve spent my life exploring how new technologies can open artistic spaces — from opera and sound installations to immersive environments. Now, with AI changing the rules of creative work, the question becomes urgent: how do we make sure this shift benefits musicians?

CORPUS is our answer. We’re building the first high-quality, ethical, and legally compliant music corpus for AI training — created by real musicians who are fairly rewarded for their work. No scraping. No exploitation. Just a system where artists are at the center of innovation.

AI can’t replace creativity — but it can unlock new forms of expression. With the right foundation, we can build tools that expand what’s possible, not just automate what already exists.

CORPUS is not just a dataset. It’s a movement. A way to make sure that AI in music reflects real artistic values — and remains rooted in the human practice of sound.

Learn more: https://crps.ai

Join us. Let’s shape the future of music — together.

16/04/2025

These images usually emerge at the beginning and the end of a collaboration. The process in between remains mostly invisible. But it’s precisely that path – the joint struggle over every pitch, every duration, every nuance of sound – that I would call 'ground truth' in art.

For "Samson" (after Rameau, directed by Claus Guth), I worked with Raphaël Pichon – and rarely has a process felt more intense. The final result, a fusion of baroque music and cinematic sound design, is not something either of us could have created alone. It’s the product of a shared journey, not just a finished artifact.

In the age of generative AI, this has become a real problem: we artists have spent too long showcasing outcomes – not how they came to be. In doing so, we’ve underestimated how easily the value of the outcome itself can be undermined when "results" seem possible without process. Fast, cheap, and at scale.

Maybe it’s time we shift the focus toward the value of process itself. And invite more people to take part in it – not just as spectators, but as co-thinkers and co-feelers. Not because it’s a novel idea. But because if we don’t, we may soon have nothing left to defend.

Foto by Helen Karam for Holophonix taken at Opera Comique, Paris

06/03/2025

??? In times when AI models simulate art at lightning speed and political decision-makers refuse to acknowledge facts, the question of fundamental truth in artistic creation seems to me more topical than ever.

Since rehearsals began on Monday at the Opéra Comique Paris, I've been feeling that tingle again - the same tingle that has accompanied me since my first school theater experiences almost 40 years ago. A feeling between anticipation and magic, a promise of the possibilities that theater holds. Of course, this initial excitement fades as soon as you get into the nitty-gritty of rehearsals, but as in any love affair, there is also a deep intimacy.

This tingling is what I experience as a ground truth.

Why do I experience this feeling so powerfully each and every time? I can’t decipher it. And maybe that in itself is already the answer.