“If you would ask me for a statement to composing, to my composing, I would answer: listening becomes the awareness of fading sound,” the German composer Eva-Maria Houben said in a lecture she delivered at a Dublin festival in 2010. “Fading sound,” she continued, “is the link between life and art; between perception in daily life and perception while performing, while composing.”

Listening to Houben’s music – in particular her piano works, which loom large in her oeuvre – you become keenly aware of fading sound. A note is struck, and rings out for a time, various partials growing more or less evident. The note decays gradually, yet the silence in its wake retains some impression of its presence. Houben wrings an extraordinary life out of each note she deploys precisely because she honors the space that follows—the presence of absence.

An organist from an early age and a musicologist whose publications embrace the full range of classical-music history, has long been associated with the Wandelweiser Group, a loosely knit collective of international composers bonded by a common interest in properties of sound, space, and silence. Though she has performed in the United States, she is chiefly known to her stateside admirers through her burgeoning discography, which includes numerous releases on the Edition Wandelweiser label as well as her own imprint, Diafani.

But in October, admirers in New York and New England will be able to hear Houben perform firsthand when she hits the road with Ordinary Affects, a Boston-based collaborative of improvising composers: in this instance, violinist Morgan Evans-Weiler, cellist Laura Cetilia, percussionist/keyboardist J.P.A. Falzone, and guitarist/programmer Luke Martin. Evidence of a previous tour the group undertook with another Wandelweiser composer, Jürg Frey, can be heard on 120 Pieces of Sound, a beautifully compelling CD newly released on the Elsewhere label.

After a weekend of rehearsals and recording at Wesleyan University, Houben and Ordinary Affects will perform at Spectrum in Brooklyn on October 15, and at The Yard in Boston’s John Hancock Building on October 16. On October 17, Houben will coach New England Conservatory students in a master class, and on October 18 the conservatory partners with Boston experimental-music presenter Non-Event and Goethe-Institut Boston to mount a concert featuring Houben performing alongside NEC student musicians. After a morning lecture-recital and an afternoon talk at the school on October 19, Houben and Ordinary Affects conclude the trek that evening at Dartmouth College.

In advance of this relative deluge of activity, Houben took a moment last week to speak to National Sawdust Log about the music she’s prepared for this encounter, and to elaborate upon her ideas about fading sound and the singularity of the present moment.

NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: I’d like to start by asking you about how the members of Ordinary Affects initiated this collaboration. Did they start by asking you for a new piece or pieces? Was it always a proposition of coming over to play with them for a bit here in the States?

EVA-MARIA HOUBEN: It was a mixture. Luke asked me to compose one new piece… and I did four new pieces. It was so funny: In my holidays I like to compose more, and it was very joyful for me to do so.

Katarina [Miljkovic, composer and New England Conservatory music theory chair] put the accent more on coaching and playing with students. So I sent several pieces to Katarina and said, “we can decide,” and she may ask the students what they would like to play. We had assembled four pieces for ensemble, and then Katarina said, “There are two pianists in the group; do you have a piece for two pianists?” And I had. So we found more and more.

And then I do the two lectures at NEC – one about musical practice as a form of life, and one lecture about how the sound of the piano decays – and a seminar coached by [performing arts administrator] Ching Yeo and [academic affairs adminstrator] Olivia Porada. I will perform excerpts of piano pieces and speak about them, and then we’ll have discussion. The tour is a nice mixture of many different activities.