And after the silence, what next? Dutch composer and flautist Antoine Beuger has spent much of his time over the past 30 years ruminating about the implications of that question. In 1992 Beuger was one of the founding members of the Wandelweiser Group, which would soon evolve into a collective of composers, improvisers and performers (including Michael Pisaro, Radu Malfatti and Jürg Frey) all motivated to go deeper into the philosophical and practical questions raised by the existence of John Cage’s conceptual masterwork 4'33". Wandelweiser to the rest of the world: Cage’s great learning is too important to ignore.

Beuger devised tschirtner tunings for twelve in 2005 and the score is realised by the ensemble Konzert Minimal on this new recording from the Sheffield-based label Another Timbre. It sprawls over a full 79 minutes, this piece which reduces the need for material to a minimum and has a score which could have been sketched out on the back of a fag packet: the thinking about what to do overriding the importance of how to do it. As I write, I’m listening. Normally if I try to write and listen, I write badly and don’t hear a thing. But Beuger’s music can be appreciated at the level of high-class background sound clouds drifting through the atmosphere.

Listen closer, though, and a network of mesmerising internal detail is revealed. Konzert Minimal is a mixed ensemble consisting of musicians who variously play notated modern composition and improvise, and actively seek out scores that require them to float somewhere between the two. And the set-up is as follows: Beuger defines notes and how this ensemble of woodwind and brass with accordion and vibraphone ought to execute them; but where the musicians choose to place those sounds is, within given time brackets, up to them. The resulting melange of sustained lines waltzing and gliding past each other, the material fixed but the structure a matter of controlled chance, reveals an unexpectedly pungent palette of sound; the less material, the more our ears can focus on the enormousness of tiny variations.