Sampling existing musical material and placing it in new contexts is a common practice in pop and electronic music. But this process is also one of the familiar tools of contemprary composition. Born in 1986, Laure M. Hiendl develops his own form of musical hacking, sometimes going so far as to “recycle” ideas that the history of music seemed to have consigned to the attic or the cellar. He draws on scores from the past, now accessible within vast digital archives that constitute a sort of collective memory, and extracts fragments from them. Not to quote them, but to construct new soundscapes, like so many sentimental landscapes from another era.

In Chronochromatic Variations III, Hiendl composes using melodic fragments from a string trio by the Anglo-Irish composer Ernest John Moeran (1894-1950), who is relatively little known today. He isolates them, breaks them down and repeats them in a loop. The seemingly endless repetition of Moeran’s tonal sounds and motifs, marked by the influence of English folk music, gives the impression that time stands still. At the same time, each of the composition’s four movements evokes the melancholy of a vague memory: something very familiar that suddenly seems distant and irretrievably lost.

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