Reiko Füting: Composer of Memory, Space, and Time

Reiko Füting-Composer

“In my music, I create a space conceptually, and what I do in time is explore it,” he explains. “I see what the space has to offer internally and externally. And since it is virtual, I can actually be inside and outside at the same time. I can be in different locations simultaneously.”

Reiko Füting: Composer of Memory, Space, and Time

To speak of Reiko Füting is to say not of a career but of an unfolding inquiry, an endless meditation on memory, tradition, and the resonance of space. He is less a composer in the conventional sense than an architect of sonic worlds, a philosopher of time who sculpts music out of remembrance, silence, and reflection.

When asked why he became a composer instead of pursuing any other path, Füting resists the language of decision. “I don’t think it was a choice,” he explains. “I have been writing music since I was eight, and I did it by myself. No one taught me to do it. It came naturally. It was a way of exploring something, and ever since, it’s all I wanted to do.” His words reveal not a profession selected but a vocation discovered, something that arose organically, as natural as breath.

Tradition as Fire, Not Ashes

For Füting, composition is an act of dialogue with history. Yet history is not a relic to be preserved behind glass. He invokes Gustav Mahler’s piercing reminder that tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire. This distinction is central to his art: he does not quote music from the past to embalm it, but to re-ignite it.

His works project the questions of our own time back into earlier musical languages, challenging us to hear the past not as something sealed but as something porous, permeable, alive. He dismantles familiar forms, interrogates them, and reconstructs them in a new light, creating music that is at once ancient and startlingly fresh.

“Past, present, and future do not exist in isolation,” Füting asserts. “They coexist.” Thus, when we listen to his music, we hear not only sounds but echoes: recollections intertwined with anticipations, memories colliding with expectations. He composes in the very seam where temporal boundaries collapse.

The Architecture of Space

If tradition is one axis of his inquiry, space is another. Füting does not approach composition as the filling of silence but as an exploration of place. Each work begins with a site: a cathedral, a concert hall, a chamber. He studies its acoustics, its history, and its symbolic weight. He listens to the architecture before placing a single note.

This is not mere programmatic writing; it is philosophical. Füting is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the “public space”, the way humans enter, shape, and are shaped by the spaces they inhabit. Music, for him, is an extension of this philosophy. “In my music, I create a space conceptually, and what I do in time is explore it,” he explains. “I see what the space has to offer internally and externally. And since it is virtual, I can actually be inside and outside at the same time. I can be in different locations simultaneously.”

Unlike composers who treat music as a linear narrative, A leading to B, to C, to D, Füting envisions music as a spatial experience. We do not travel through it; we dwell in it. His works are less journeys than architectures of sound, where listeners are free to wander, linger, and inhabit multiple perspectives at once.

A Lineage of Influence

Füting’s aesthetic is illuminated by the composers he reveres. From Helmut Lachenmann, he absorbed the conviction that every sound is inseparable from the action that produces it: the bow scraping across the string, the breath behind the flute. Sound, in this view, is not only vibration but gesture, body, and labor.

From Gérard Grisey, the pioneer of spectral music, Füting inherited an obsession with the organic quality of sound itself, its birth, growth, and decay across time. Grisey’s vision of sound as a living entity resonates in Füting’s own explorations of temporality.

From Bernd Alois Zimmermann, he learned to see time not as a line but as a sphere, where all events coexist. This philosophy undergirds Füting’s rejection of temporal separation: “I don’t believe in the division of past, present, and future anymore. I believe they coexist in a certain way. Therefore, referencing different genres and styles of music is not a contradiction, but a necessity.”

These influences allow Füting to dwell in paradox. He is deeply German, shaped by his cultural lineage, yet he is also radically global, open to countless idioms and styles. He lives “in between,” navigating belonging and freedom simultaneously.

The Composer and the Performer

Füting often writes for performers he knows personally, valuing the intimacy of this collaboration. For him, the relationship between composer and performer is not transactional but relational, almost sacred. The performer does not simply execute his score but enters into dialogue with it, shaping its realization.

This partnership reflects Füting’s broader philosophy: that music is not a solitary artifact but a shared space of discovery. Every performance is a new habitation of that space, a different angle on the same architecture, a new set of footprints across the floor.

Pedagogy and Responsibility

As Dean of Composition at the Manhattan School of Music, Füting extends his philosophy into education. He does not wish to create a bubble in which young composers compose only for each other. Instead, he urges his students to ask: What relevance does our art have beyond ourselves?

“Shift the focus from ‘us’ and refocus it on the community and society,” he insists. Art, for Füting, is not only self-expression; it is responsibility. Yet he is wary of art dissolving entirely into politics. He believes the arts must maintain a degree of distance—an emancipatory gap that allows critique, reflection, and imagination.

His advice to students is deceptively simple: listen, learn, and allow things to come to you. True artistic insight, he believes, cannot be rushed; it must be earned.

Memory as Utopia

At the core of Füting’s work lies memory. For him, memory is not passive recollection but active architecture. He treats memory as a kind of material, quoting, deconstructing, and reassembling fragments of past music until they reveal new meaning.

Jean Paul once wrote, “Our memories are the only paradise from which we can never be expelled.” Füting composes with this conviction. Memory is his utopia, his terrain of freedom. It allows him to collapse time, to integrate and disintegrate, to reflect upon the most urgent artistic, cultural, and political questions of today.

He admits his growing interest in music’s political dimension. Quotations, for him, are not neutral references but tools: ways of exploring inclusion and exclusion, assimilation and segregation. Through memory, he reflects upon society’s fractures and continuities, its borders and transitions.

Toward a Concrete Utopia

Füting’s artistic statement reads almost like a manifesto. He seeks experiences of form, time, and space. He is drawn to the architecture of proportions, to the temporal perception of sound, to the interrelationship of material. He quotes Debussy, “Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of infinity”, and Schiller, who declared that humans are most fully human when they play.

His own conviction echoes Ernst Bloch: “Music is a concrete utopia.” In Füting’s works, we glimpse that utopia, not a dream of escape, but a lived encounter with memory, tradition, and space transformed. His music is not narrative, not monument, but invitation: a space in which listeners are free to wander, remember, and imagine.

To enter Reiko Füting’s music is to step into a world where past and present overlap, where silence and sound intertwine, where tradition burns anew. He is not merely a composer of notes, but of memory itself, an artist who reminds us that music is not a line to be followed, but a world to be inhabited.