For the exact placement of multifaceted reality in art, especially in music, the invention of electroacoustic sound storage and reproduction , especially the development of tape around 1950, naturally played the decisive role. What was possible until this point, i.e. only an imitation of noises in musical nature paintings achieved through more or less smart orchestrations, has since then been a concrete element at the composerís disposal. Any preexisting sound can now, one by one, be integrated into music, thanks to the digital possibilities of today and the ever-improving technology of loudspeakers. Or, as is often the case in the contemporary composition, any existing sound can serve as the foundation for a work derived only from this sound, with which the distance between art and the mundane, between art and nature is noticeably diminished. Amongst these poles, in the flowing continuum of abstraction and the concrete, are situated the electroacoustic works of Gunther Becker. Lying beneath his composition Ferrophonie are the sounds of various steel products: plates, tapes, balls, treads, bars, chains, railroad tracks, pipes, washing-machine drums, etc. Four players set the steel products in their place and then in motion. These sounds are carried to four synthesizers and immediately modulated by means of a special program, then mixed together by the sound engineer Gunther Becker and at once broadcast through loudspeakers. Aus Alpbachs Hain und Flur evokes images of nature and moods that a walker may experience during his observations of a landscape. To Becker, this piece is reminiscent of fourteen days that he spent in Alpbach (Tirol) in September, 1978, in order to participate in a workshop on ìComposition ñ Improvisation and Electronic Sound Transformation.î The theme of Passagen is the constant alternation between preservation and disassembly of the semantic text plain, the layered meaning of the words. Speech is here persistently altered, modulated between a flowing continuum of comprehension and incomprehension. Similar to our hearing and sight in everyday life, this work is one mostly incessant acoustic passage throughout which the rooms and situations modify themselves, so that the work as a whole plays with different transitional situations of listening: with the simultaneity of near/clear, distant/unclear, near/unclear, distant/clear, and innumerable other interludes, gradually merging into one another.