Laure M. Hiendl presents the work "In Abeyance" as part of "Tunings of the World 2.0" on the 29th of October at Fahrbereitschaft (Teilelager). In this interview, Hiendl explains how Lauren Berlant's theories informed their work, how an orchestra can be converted into a sampler and what (or what not) this has to do with R. Murray Schafer's notion of the soundscape.
The term "animated still-life" expresses a kind of temporality that fascinated me: in a certain way, the apparent opposites of movement and stillness are connected. Berlant's writing is characterised by an incredible precision, elegance and by a poetic power through which Berlant - similar to the works by Édouard Glissant or Fred Moten - poetically connects and works through conceptual opposites. Through this poetic connection, a different space opens up that steps out of the processes of historical-linear thinking and enables other ways of thinking.
In Berlant's book, this critique of historical-linear thinking arises from an extensive critique of society, which I cannot go into here. What I was fascinated with was the consequence Berlant drew from this for aesthetic forms and formats: Not the linear dramaturgies that still characterise the formal language of Western concert music today are the adequate forms of our time, but what Berlant calls the "impasse," or the "stretched-out-present": a kind of perpetual, opaque, extended present that develops nowhere - especially not forwards, at most sideways perhaps, laterally....
The animated still life, in its moving standstill, captures precisely this sense of time that I wanted to realise sonically in "In Abeyance." And "In Abeyance" also contains precisely these contrasts - though of course it is also a concert piece that has a beginning and an end - but which hopefully opens up a different, non-teleological musical space of experience in between.