Founded in 1980 and at home in Frankfurt am Main, the Ensemble Modern is one of the world’s leading ensembles for new music. The orchestra currently consists of 19 soloists from different nations: Argentina, Australia, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Japan and Switzerland make up the cultural background of this formation.

The Ensemble Modern’s programmes are characterised by long-lasting collaborations with artists such as Heiner Goebbels, Frank Zappa, Bill Viola and Steve Reich, as well as renowned conductors such as Peter Eötvös, Heinz Holliger, Lothar Zagrosek and Hans Zender.

Tours have taken the Ensemble Modern to Russia, South America, the US, Japan, Australia, India, Korea and Taiwan. It performs regularly at renowned festivals such as the Lincoln Center Festival in New York, Festival d'Automne à Paris and the Lucerne Festival. It has also appeared at such outstanding venues in Germany as Alte Oper Frankfurt, the Cologne Philharmonie, concert halls in Berlin and Dortmund, and the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden.

The Ensemble Modern performs around 100 concerts each year. In close collaboration with the composers, trying to achieve the best possible results, the musicians work each year on around 70 new works, with more than 20 premieres among them. In 2003, the German Federal Cultural Foundation declared the Ensemble Modern as a “lighthouse” of contemporary culture in Germany.

The Deutsche Bank Foundation has supported numerous individual projects of the Ensemble Modern since its founding – such as the premieres of the “Eisler project” and “Landscape with distant relatives” from composer Heiner Goebbels. The Foundation also began supporting the subscription series at the Alte Oper Frankfurt in the 2004/2005 season, which was supplemented with an introductory series in which composers, conductors and musicologists explain the respective concert programme to the audience.

The Foundation is also a founding partner of the Ensemble Modern Orchestra, established 1988 for the sole purpose of staging large-ensemble productions and the world’s first orchestra dedicated solely to the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. This includes the award of commissioned works: Heiner Goebbels' “Walden” and Michael Gordon’s “Sunshine of your Life” are among the works written specifically for the Ensemble Modern Orchestra. Past conductors include Peter Eötvös, John Adams, George Benjamin, Ingo Metzmacher and Pierre Boulez.

Its work is project-specific: twice each year, specialists for contemporary music and young musicians from all over the world come together around the basis of the Ensemble Modern’s soloists and go on tour as the Ensemble Modern Orchestra.