"Philipp Blume’s S, M, L, XL (2010) [is] an intensely dissonant but
texturally varied work meant to explore size and our perception of it.
That is a fairly concrete idea for such an abstract work, but the
contrasts and interplay among sustained tones, pizzicatos and trills,
silences, pianissimos and fortissimos (all musical depictions of size)
made the work seem akin to Cubism in the visual arts. "
- Allan Kozinn, New York Times, Review of Argento Ensemble's Lunar Movements Series, August 29, 2010
"Philipp Blume was born in Freiburg and raised in California.. a wanderer between two worlds.
"His music has a little of both: the graceful lightness and openness of the Pacific coast combined with the methodical rigor of the Freiburg School. His scores are carefully made, rhythmically varied, sonically fanciful in polyphonic structures, but simultaneously spacious: his sounds seem to float on air.
"His works have an independent streak, but also their whimsical side... [an] immensely gifted composer"
- Dieter Schnebel, Laudatio penned for the presentation of the Ferruccio Busoni promotional composition prize, Academy of Arts, Berlin, June 7, 2005
"Philipp Blume is a highly talented and motivated, self-reliant, imaginative, very productive, technically shrewd, expressively incisive composer, who will surely make a name for himself in new music. He is deserving of every form of recognition and I wish him well."
-Mathias Spahlinger, November 29, 1999
"The composer's personal style is unmistakable: Blume's music is
spartan, full of bright timbres and mostly gentle dynamics, and in more
than one sense profound."
- Rheinpfalz, June 27, 2000
"... it was the piece by Philipp Blume (Domestic Words and Phrases) that one would have liked to hear a second time. Blume had taken "musical continuity" as his subject, yet the whole was much more than a tinkering with compositional problems. It was a music that could certainly live up to purely aesthetic standards."
- Elisabeth Schwind, Badische Zeitung, June 14, 1999
"Philipp Blume's search for correspondences between phonetic sounds and music in the (here premiered) Büxn=Aufschrifftn was a pleasure to listen to: though the effect of the piece is mostly pointillistic, time and again interesting relationships between spoken and musical timbre and imagery were explored in long, captivating passages."
-Susanne Benda, Badische Zeitung, April 27, 1999
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