It’s only a game, a game with terms and associations and the semantic fields that they call forth. When the pianist Sebastian Sternal was naming his new project, in which he enlarged the fine sound of his piano trio to include a four-piece horn section and a string quartet, and then named the project “Sternal Symphonic Society”, he knew exactly what reaction he could expect: A very large format comes to mind, a mega power plant of feelings with its elaborate machinery, its carefully drawn blueprints and its excess of details. Lingering in the background as well, we are reminded of symphonic societies, of that bourgeois circle that manufactured discourse, that once helped the composer to direct significance and meaning into his compositions. On the one hand.