Chronochromatic Variations IV (2026)
for ensemble (15 min.) View score excerpt
Commissioned by MaerzMusik
Text by Andreas Karl
For the cycle Chronochromatic Variations, the Berlin based composer Laure M. Hiendl draws on short fragments of the classical-romantic repertoire, sampling and recomposing them in an idiosyncratic manner. By slightly shifting the chosen excerpt of each sample with every repetition, he subjects the phrase to subtle transformations. What emerges is a form of developing variation in which musical time itself becomes form-generating material. For, analogous to the twelve tones of the chromatic aggregate, Hiendl conceives of duration as a scale, modeling specific "duration-colors" from its internal relations. The music thus appears — in Lauren Berlant's phrase — as a "animated still life": seemingly static, yet in fact traversed by continuous motion. This choreography of the smallest gestures and stirrings offers itself as an invitation to embodied engagement.
As in the first two parts of the cycle, the piano plays a central role in Variation IV. It begins alone; one becomes immersed in the motion of the material, attending to the abrupt, glitch-like pauses and to how the material shifts slightly each time. After a caesura, the ensemble takes over. Its warm sound immediately conjures images that persist across the silences, overlapping in curious ways with the music as it starts up again and again. One loses oneself in the material's similarities, almost as though a second music were taking shape in one's mind. The piano gradually finds its way back into the ensemble before the sound, at the close, withdraws into the interior of the instrument.
The work's sample material draws on a pastoral, nostalgic idiom — a style that, like classicism itself, always points to something long lost, something that never existed in this form and yet is conjured back into false life. Hiendl composes with cultural artifacts washed up like flotsam on a postmodern shore. His works are studies of the status quo of music and its perception. In these studies he refuses the faith in progress that ceaselessly hungers for the new, seeking instead creative ways of engaging with the driftwood of history.
Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Konzerthaus, Wien
March 2026
Klangforum Wien
Vimbayi Kaziboni — conductor