Nik Bärtsch

Listening

Music, Movement, Mind

LISTENING: Music – Movement – Mind is a conceptual and practical book about the creative relationship between mind and body in the context of music and martial arts. Musician and composer Nik Bärtsch, founder of the so-called Ritual Groove Music, has developed techniques that offer musicians and martial artists useful and surprising tools to support, focus and simplify learning and creative processes in many fields of artistic activity and daily life.

The book is based on the long-standing experience of Nik Bärtsch and his wife Andrea Pfisterer 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 authors’ poetic understanding of body and mind and inspires the individual creativity and consciousness of the readers, regardless of their backgrounds. It also documents the stages of Bärtsch’s musical development as composer, solo pianist and bandleader of Ronin and Mobile, two formations that enjoy international recognition.

LISTENING: Music – Movement – Mind is a conceptual and practical book about the creative relationship between mind and body in the context of music and martial arts. Musician and composer Nik Bärtsch, founder of the so-called Ritual Groove Music, has developed techniques that offer musicians and martial artists useful and surprising tools to support, focus and simplify learning and creative processes in many fields of artistic activity and daily life.

The book is based on the long-standing experience of Nik Bärtsch and his wife Andrea Pfisterer 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 authors’ poetic understanding of body and mind and inspires the individual creativity and consciousness of the readers, regardless of their backgrounds. It also documents the stages of Bärtsch’s musical development as composer, solo pianist and bandleader of Ronin and Mobile, two formations that enjoy international recognition.


Sumptuously produced by noted arts imprint Lars Müller Publishers, ambitious in its scope, and bristling with thought provoking observations, Bärtsch’s defiantly unconventional volume rarely shoots wide of the mark.”
JazzJournal

«Kann das gutgehen, wenn ein Künstler ein Buch über sich und seine Kunst schreibt? Im Fall von Nik Bärtsch durchaus
NZZ Neue Zürcher Zeitung


 

Author(s): Nik Bärtsch in collaboration with Andrea Pfisterer

Design: Integral Lars Müller

15 × 21,5 cm, 6 × 8 ½ in

352 pages, 194 illustrations

paperback

2021, 978-3-03778-670-3, English
CHF 45.00

Nik Bärtsch

Nik Bärtsch (*1971 in Zürich) is an internationally renowned composer, pianist and teacher. Bärtsch received lessons in jazz piano and drums from the age of eight; in 1997, he graduated with a classical piano diploma from the Zurich Academy of Music (now Zurich University of the Arts). Bärtsch is known as the founder of the so-called Ritual Groove Music. Either solo or with his groups Mobile and Ronin, Bärtsch plays textures between jazz, funk, new music, minimal, ritual and sacred music. His work is inspired by the Japanese culture, especially the martial art Aikido.