Although listening plays a conceptually important role in "Musique d'Hiver", none of the performers is permitted to close their eyes. The conductor directs the organ and orchestra as if through a sea of time, in which a sequence of numbers and time designations – such as buoys – offer the only orientation. The concerto provides a testimony of an era when much thought was being given to alternatives to the conventional organization of time. Born in 1926 but never part of the close circle of the post-war avant-garde, Jolas goes her own way here. Her score is extremely demanding for the conductor. "Calculate first, then swim out freely on your own," Titus Engel, who conducted the belated second performance in Cologne, sums up the challenge. It is precisely this fruitful contrast between openness and determinacy that characterizes the organ concerto. When asked why she does not simply allow the interpreters more freedom, the composer answers: "Why should I, particularly as a woman, leave the realization of my dreams to someone else?" Jolas composes endings like question marks with a knowing wink. This also holds true for her second organ work, "Musique de Jour". By the title "day music", the early riser is referring to the day in contrast to the night. Here she continues her experiment with free notation and writes in the preface that she is once again working on "reconciling rigor and expression". Less theatrical than the concerto but similarly scaled down, this organ work begins solely on the note G in the middle of the keyboard. And once again the beginning feels things out until the gestures take possession of the entire tonal space. It sounds as if we were listening to the music as it comes into being. Impulses become brief interval combinations, initial trills that lose themselves in the high ranges. Often we hear a single note underneath, like a minimal accompaniment. With the unfolding of the melodic language above the pedal point, Jolas recalls Claudio Monteverdi’s "stile rappresentativo": the solo, she notes, is a “twofold homage to Monteverdi and Bach”. The organ then slowly works its way up to Bach-style counterpoint until we reach a four-part fugue. And after the material is once again drastically scaled down in the coda, the bright light of the day fades away in dim registers. “I DON’T LIKE THE NIGHT”, writes Jolas in the foreword to the "Leçons du Petit Jour", which was written as recently as 2007. She always composes in the early morning, when Paris, where she lives to this day, slowly awakens. These hours give her the "lessons of light" which lend the work its name and which, speaking, singing, and writing, she transforms into music. Immediately in the first measure, she captures the sounds of the "ugly Parisian pigeons", relegating them to a repeated G (the work begins on this note as well), in order to free the mind from cooing so it can devote itself to more captivating songs. She shares with her teacher Olivier Messiaen a love of bird calls. In the Leçons, they flash forth in brief songs, usually in free tempo and incorporated into a tranquil, dusky soundscape. Here as well, the organ never reveals its potential for force as an end in itself. And at the conclusion, the music withdraws back into itself, as it were, to the note in the middle of the keyboard. Since Jolas discovered the organ, the instrument has been her favourite alongside the cello, viola, and the voice. The "Trois Études Campanaires", originally intended for the carillon of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois, are performed here (based on the piano version) on a church organ. "Cherchons les Cloches" (Let us look for the bells), the composer advises the performer, alluding to Claude Debussy – a proposal for which the St. Antonius organ in Düsseldorf-Oberkassel with its percussion stops is ideally suited. The lively first Étude, in which Angela Metzger combines the vibraphone, marimba, and celesta stops, is followed by the tranquil second, using only the sounds of the celesta. The third, with its rapid strings of notes in the high ranges, has the special feature of being split up into several tempo levels, underlined here by the choice of celesta (upper voice), marimba (middle voices), and carillon (lower voice). Transferring the three etudes to the organ is musically satisfying and suits Jolas’s enthusiasm for the instrument which was kindled early in her life. As a teenager, she was visiting Iowa when an organist and family friend opened up a small church for her and left her alone with the instrument. The composer remembers as if it were yesterday: “For the first time in my life, I was alone on the organ and pulled out all the stops. I made an unbelievable clamour. A squad of soldiers who were in the neighbourhood checked to see who was making so much noise in the church. And they saw a girl sitting there."