For me, the piece represents one of various attempts to break away from a strictly selective musical thinking with which I had identified since my studies with Luigi Nono and to which I was determined to remain faithful in my own way, especially at that time when the so-called avant-garde seemed to be increasingly making surrealist compromises with bourgeois comfort.

The line-up – clarinet, viola and drums (marimba with alpine bells, cymbals, timpani and bongos) – ensured a homogeneous starting point for the instrumental means, from which on the one hand a kind of sound gesture – that is, narrower or more branched tonal figurations – could be developed, while on the other hand the sound differentiation could be pushed further inward, right into the conscious anatomy of the resulting (blown, beaten, rubbed, bowed, plucked, dabbed, etc.) sound. This music moves between these two opposites – the liquefaction of the selective thought here and its petrification or inner rupture, opening there – opposites that I took further to radical extremes in later works, while here the whole thing still has a more abstract, playful overall character remains committed.

(Helmut Lachenmann, 1989)