Enno Poppe studied composition and conducting at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin with Friedrich Goldmann and Gösta Neuwirth, among others. He studied further at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe. Since 1998 he has conducted the ensemble mosaik for contemporary music in Berlin. He taught from 2002 to 2004 at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler".
The German-French composer Mark Andre (b.1964) is one of the most important representatives of New Music. His twelve "Miniatures" for string quartet were composed in 2014/17 as a commission from the Arditti Quartet, Bavarian Radio's "musica viva", the Festival d'Automne à Paris and the ProQuartet-CEMC, funded by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. Andre created his organ work "Himmelfahrt" (Ascension), funded by the Siemens Music Foundation, in 2018 on behalf of the Evangelical Church in Germany. The orchestral work woher…wohin was written between 2015 and 2017 as a composition commission by BR's "musica viva" in conjunction with the Happy New Ears prize for composition from the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation. The live recordings of all three works are now being released in the CD edition of Bavarian Radio's "musica viva" concert series on BR-KLASSIK.
The Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik (Witten Days for New Chamber Music) is a music festival for contemporary chamber music, jointly organised by the town Witten in the Ruhr Area and the broadcasting station Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). The concerts take place over a weekend at the end of April or in early May, and concentrate on world premieres of small-scale works, more than 600 as of 2010. They are broadcast worldwide via the European Broadcasting Union.