the Tonhalle Orchester Zürich's Creative Chair in the 2015–16 season. On 9 September 2015, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra announced they were commissioning a work from Widmann as part of a planned collaboration by the two organizations beginning in the fall of 2017. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra announced Widmann's appointment as its first-ever Gewandhauskomponist (Gewandhaus composer) for the 2017–18 season. Widmann's oratorio ARCHE had its world premiere on 13 January 2017 on the occasion of the opening festivities of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. The Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano performed it. A concert by Widmann, Daniel Barenboim, and Anna Prohaska opened the Pierre Boulez Saal on 4 March 2017. On 27 January 2018 Widmann and the Hagen Quartet performed his Clarinet Quintet, as part of a European tour, at Amsterdam's Muziekgebouw aan het IJ. Partita, five reminiscences for large orchestra, commissioned by the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was premiered in Leipzig on 8 March 2018 with Andris Nelsons conducting. After the world premiere in 2012 at the Bavarian State Opera, in 2019 a new Berlin version of his opera Babylon was performed at the Berlin State Opera on Unter den Linden under the musical direction of Christopher Ward. Anne-Sophie Mutter is the dedicatee of String Quartet No. 6 (Study on Beethoven, 2019). With this piece, Widmann began a new series of works in the genre. Widmann held the 2019–20 Richard and Barbara Debs Composer's Chair at Carnegie Hall. During the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, he contributed to the online Festival of New Music with his composition empty space. Barenboim and Emanuel Pahud curated the festival in the empty Pierre Boulez Saal. Musical style Sounds, not tones, are the focus of Widmann's thinking. His music integrates serialism and noise in traditional sources. In most of his compositions, Widmann is in a musical "dialogue" with Classical-Romantic composers such as Schumann, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms. He wrote musical tributes to these composers. Widmann has written pieces without pitches and also purely tonal pieces with exaggerated familiar gestures. The scores show extremely precise, well-considered structures and instructions. He uses extended techniques in many compositions, such as Con brio. He finds inspiration in literature, poems, paintings and sculptures and frequently uses literary sources for his compositions, like Matthias Claudius, Klabund, Heinrich Heine, Peter Sloterdijk, Clemens Brentano and Friedrich Schiller. According to Bachtrack, Widmann