Map of Moods
1996 live album by Tristan Honsinger

Map of Moods is a live album by cellist Tristan Honsinger. It was recorded in April 1994 at the Workshop Freie Musik at the Straßenbahndepot in Berlin, and was released by FMP in 1996. On the album, Honsinger is joined by violinists Aleksander Kolkowski and Stephano Lunardi, bassist Ernst Glerum, and drummer Louis Moholo.
According to Honsinger, Map of Moods had its origins in a theater music work that resulted in "a constructed chaos that inspired a heightened sense of communication between the participants," in which the musicians "tried to make a cut-up narrative using a cueing system to break up the story line so that we could stop the linearity of the narrative at any point with a cue that would lead it to another point in the story before or after." The music heard on the album consists of four movements called "Areas," which, in turn, are divided into smaller units. These sections are characterized by schematic and thematic identities which "allow the composition to function as a cartographer, with improvisation filling in local color and scenery." The players are required to stick to the composer's conception of the work unless they feel they can improve upon it. Moholo acts as a director, providing guidance and trigger points for the other musicians.
Reception
In a review for AllMusic, Thom Jurek wrote: "this is a playful and profound piece of compositional genius by Honsinger, and should be sought out by anyone who has an interest in improvisational or modern European classical music."
The authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz stated: "Honsinger's love of string instruments is well evidenced and the sound of the group is lusciously 'classical', even when the attacks are quite extreme."
Track listing
All compositions by Tristan Honsinger.
“Map of Moods” enters the record as 1996 live album by Tristan Honsinger. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Moods, live and album can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q112957890. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1994 and 1996.
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This entry incorporates text from “Map of Moods” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.