Finding Cues: A Conversation with Elias Stemeseder on ‘Studies in Prolation, for S-L plus Ensemble’

Often, great treasures can be found in mines already long before dug. This is certainly the case with the lautenwerk. A now rare European keyboard from the Baroque era, the lautenwerk combines the mechanics of a harpsichord with lute-like strings.  A favorite of Johann Sebastian Bach, the instrument largely fell out of favor as the harsher metal strings of a modern piano came to dominate. But there is still something quite special about the softened and more gentle tones of the lautenwerk. Eighteenth-century scholar Jacob Adlung called it “the most beautiful of all keyboard instruments after the organ.” Contemporary keyboardist Dongsok Shin has noted how the lautenwerk “can pull certain heartstrings.” The point being that there is something special about this instrument that has been mostly forgotten to time. Elias Stemeseder sagely builds upon these qualities in his forthcoming Roulette Intermedium performance titled ‘Studies in Prolation, for S-L plus Ensemble.’

The result of Stemeseder’s 2024-2025 Roulette Commission, ‘Studies in Prolation’ is presented by a sextet that includes not one lautenwerk, but two of them. One is performed by Stemeseder and the other by Phillip Golub. The work itself takes its name from rhythmic structures in mensural notation; the compositional system used for polyphonic European vocal music from the late thirteenth century to the early seventeenth century. The project also uses meantone tuning, a system of temperament that adjusts the size of perfect fifths to create “better-sounding” thirds. The system was in wide use in the sixteenth century and largely disappeared during the eighteenth. Given this backdrop’s focus on the past, it is easy to assume that the work will be fully revisionist or nostalgic. 

But such a perspective overlooks the Austrian keyboardist’s career to date. His other work – whether exploring Just Intonation as part of Anna Webber’s Shimmer Wince or his longstanding duo with producer-drummer Christian Lillinger – shows an incredibly forward-thinking artist. Fittingly, rather than merely looking back at what came before. Stemeseder adapts history to the modern era. 

The Roulette ensemble takes his work with Lillinger, who provides percussion for this outing alongside Shakoor Hakeem, as a core component of the group. It further adds cutting-edge electronics by the leader and Simon Kanzler. The result is a work that, while adopting the magic timbre and structures of a time past, instead engages in a form of time-hopping, arguably even trying to transcend history itself. The addition of gayageum, played by DoYeon Kim, suggests not merely a pan-temporal focus but a cross-cultural one as well.  And the reason this all works is that the project focuses on something larger than a time, place, or specific community; it emphasizes how all people unite in a shared desire to express what is deep in their souls, whether manifested through the plucking of a string, the beating of a drum, or the manipulation of a highly advanced manmade machine. 

We sat down with Stemeseder to discuss the project and what lucky audience members can expect to experience at Roulette on January 17, 2026. 

PostGenre: How did you start playing the lautenwerk?

Elias Stemeseder: It happened mostly by coincidence. I started by playing harpsichords more generally. A friend of mine had a harpsichord that they had inherited from their grandfather.  It was a student instrument, and I started playing it in 2020, during the [Coronavirus] pandemic. I went back to New York in 2022 for a residency scheduled at The Stone. I had been working as a duo with Christian Lillinger since 2021 and wanted to bring that project with him to the residency. However, the initial idea that led me to my current project came from a few gigs Christian and I had done with Brandon Seabrook on banjo. I wanted to form a group that featured mostly plucked instruments, and Christian seemed like the perfect drummer for that, with his very precise rhythms. Christian and I discussed that project, and we started working on it with me on a harpsichord. But I didn’t have a harpsichord in New York, so I was directed to Ben Katz, an early music harpsichordist. Ben first introduced me to the lautenwerk.

PG: It must be difficult to find an instrument like the lautenwerk compared to a more modern instrument.

ES: It is. But if you know a builder, they can build one for you. Earlier this year, I bought one of my own. I visited Stephen Sørli, a builder in Amherst, Massachusetts, who built my lautenwerk. When I saw the instrument, it was a little like love at first sight.

PG: There are many older harpsichord instruments out there. Why the lautenwerk specifically?

ES: I was drawn to its sound. I like a lot of folk music that uses plucked strings. All kinds of sitar, oud, and acoustic guitar music speaks to me. The lautenwerk, to me, makes types of sounds reminiscent of those. I also find it fascinating that you can tune the lautenwerk and get into colors that are unrelated to piano music. On the lautenwerk, you can play certain things that you could also play on a piano, but it also has its own sound with a very different frame of reference.

PG: You also play various synthesizers. Do you feel your experience with synths shapes how you approach older instruments, like the lautenwerk, or vice versa?

ES: To an extent it does. I think both being a pianist and playing electronic keyboards is already a little bit of a stretch because those keyboards aren’t made to be played like a piano. So, there’s a kind of flexibility that you need to have to do both. You also need a willingness to be open to whatever the instrument gives you.

In this case, the lautenwerk lacks dynamics. I had a conversation with Craig Taborn a few years ago. At the time, I wasn’t fully accepting of the fact that certain keyboards behave differently. Craig told me that he approaches keyboards like it is mixed martial arts. Each martial art utilizes a different movement matrix. You need to realize that the movements are different and that their strengths lie in those differences. That really stuck with me.

PG: Do you take those differences into consideration when you are writing music?

ES: In the case of this particular project, yes, because some of what I am doing for it is also coming from the other implication that old keyboard instruments bring out, which is tuning. Not so much because the sound of the lautenwerk is more mellow. You could play it in equal temperament and sound good. But without chords and with steel strings, I don’t really like the lautenwerk’s sound when it is tuned in equal temperament. You hear the beatings much too strongly. However, in general, I’ve been fascinated with tunings. I’ve never been fascinated with just intonation like many people are these days. It hasn’t been my central fascination. However, I have been deep into working with historic tunings. Somehow, I got into them through a database I found of all kinds of historic tunings. I started tuning my harpsichord in those and developed a fascination for those colors.

PG: Originally, did you use trial and error to determine which tunings to explore further?

ES: Yeah. I also needed to accept that they each may behave differently. You may play things that are not meant for those tunings and find you get different colorings when you use them. That’s part of the process of tuning and in deriving some material from all the sound and the ratios or mathematical relations between the pitches.

PG: As far as the group you will present at Roulette on January 17th, how did you determine its instrumentation? Was your focus mostly on alternative tunings?

ES: I think it comes back to the initial idea that I wanted to pursue in this group with Christian, of having a lack of sustain, but also the kind of effect you get with a lot of attacks. I initially wanted to have more musicians as part of the group. I asked a qanun player to join us, but the person I asked didn’t have time. I don’t know many other plucked instruments that I wanted to be part of the process. I didn’t want to ask a guitarist because there would have needed to be some compromises.

Christian and I have been, as a duo, incorporating other players into our music. Especially people who don’t come from the same backgrounds we do. We like to see what type of process results from working with people with very different backgrounds. We have been working with DoYeon [Kim] on and off for a few years now.

PG: So, the addition of DoYeon’s gayageum was never a conscious choice to draw lines between older Western music and Eastern music?

ES: That line is drawn automatically because it’s a frame of reference people have. But I don’t really think in those terms. I was thinking more in terms of sound. My focus is not so much geographic as it is emphasizing the most basic processes of soundmaking next to singing, whether plucking a string or beating a drum.

PG: So, where do electronics fit in? They are a bit more removed from basic approaches to instruments.

ES: Yeah. In my duo with Christian, we work on our principal instruments, which are keyboards. We’re always surrounded by all types of produced electronic music. With electronics, however, I don’t really have a template for what we’re doing. There’s always a bigger chance of failure when there’s no safety net in terms of how the group should play together. But I do see it as a responsibility for musicians working today to embrace new processes.

PG: Is it especially difficult to incorporate electronics in a way that would work with the lautenwerk’s alternate tunings?

ES: The person I’m working with, Simon Kanzler, studied machine learning at IRCAM in Paris and is deeply focused on things related to machine learning and sample matching. For this project, I made a library of about eight hundred different samples of plucking techniques, and that sample library goes into his system. It is my understanding that Simon uses them in a proto-AI approach based on machine learning, but doesn’t do the synthesis process in terms of coming up with its own way of wiring itself. It responds in real time to what we give it, rather than inventing its own tuning or sound world. And that approach has helped us avoid issues of finding a way to combine electronics with the lautenwerk’s alternate tunings without fully resorting to AI.

PG: In general, because the instrumentation is so unique, what is your process for writing for this group?

ES: There’s not a single answer. Many of the compositional ideas come from my duo work with Christian, and I am simply developing them further. I’m trying to take certain elements of our work together to the next step. Something we’ve been incorporating every now and then has been polyrhythmic music or music with multiple pulses. That came from the idea of using reduced click tracks for different players. We haven’t rehearsed yet, but I am making a first attempt at taking that idea to a more pronounced level. I have been writing music that works with very different types of grids and pulses. Players will have click tracks, and there will be modules. Each piece consists of multiple modules that are related to click tracks. I don’t know if we will use that approach for the entire performance set but there’s an organizational level based around those click tracks.

Another vague reference was pre-Renaissance notation. I had read a little about such notation, and one thing I found fascinating about it that there was never a score. There were only parts. Each individual voice only had their part and there were no conductors. The idea with that approach was to figure out how to take certain simple ingredients and then, through interaction, get a level of complexity. People have been doing that for a long time. A lot of electronic music does that. [György] Ligeti also did a lot of work in that space, too. I am just doing my own version of seeing how to combine ingredients in a way that keeps them flexible enough for people to shape the music with their own voices while maintaining a pretty deterministic structure.

PG: It is interesting that you are drawing lines from early music through contemporary Western classical composers like Ligeti to modern electronic music. Most people would not necessarily connect these different forms in a singular manner.

ES: I have no idea if it’s worthwhile to do so. It’s an ongoing process for me that has intermittent stages of completion. Stages where things culminate and are hopefully successful. But there are also many other artists who are exploring those connections. Peter Evans listens to a lot of Renaissance music, but applies those references in a very modern context. Some pianist friends of mine – Jon Elbaz and Philip Golub – are also fascinated with early keyboards. My friend, Georg Vogel, is an instrument builder and brilliant pianist/keyboardist in Vienna, Austria. He builds his own microtonal instruments that are based on the Vicentino model. He works predominantly with hexachord theory and Renaissance solfege techniques. There is definitely a group of us looking back at early music and seeing how it connects to newer music.

PG: In these regards, how much of your work is research? It seems like you would need to go back and look at older approaches and forms often.

ES: That’s the fun part. Sometimes that research is more fun than actually playing. It’s fun to learn about how things used to be done – how things were organized in the past – and why. I also like to learn about why certain things were abandoned. For instance, mensural notation divides the whole note. A perfect division was in three, and an imperfect was in two. Which now seems…

PG: Crazy.

ES: Crazy, yeah, because so much music today is divided by two. One theory is that the distinction comes because back in the late Thirteenth Century, lower social classes sang in three and the upper ones in two. I don’t know if that history is accurate. But it shows how questions of rhythm and meter were once tightly bound up with social structures. And if true, that is interesting because the division of the bar into nine parts was presumably very normal because it allowed you to have a double perfect, three by three.

PG: When an approach or idea is abandoned, how do you find out whether such abandonment is due to broader social forces or because there is legitimately a better way of approaching in music theory, perhaps through new technology?

ES: There’s probably both a scientific answer and a separate artistic answer to that.  However, I believe everything is out there for us to try to use. The entire past is there for us. Some of it we’ve followed through with and can still see today. And for those things that we didn’t, we should try to take some cues from them. The world has changed so much over the centuries, but the humanity that is behind music remains. And, sometimes, our artistic ancestors have left cues for us that we aren’t paying enough attention to. We just have to find them and see for ourselves.

Elias Stemeseder will be presenting ‘Studies in Prolation, for S-L plus Ensemble’ at Roulette Intermedium on January 17, 2026. It will also be available via free livestream on Youtube. More information on Elias Stemeseder is available on his website.

Photo credit: Szymon Hantkiewicz