Schwinden
1994 – wip

d-is-appear
1994
pno, vn, vc
00:11:00
WP 1995-01-26
Rudolf-Steiner-Schule, Bielefeld, Germany
Ensemble Köln,
Leitung: Robert HP Platz
Irvine Arditti. Solo-Violine
Roman Guggenberger, Violoncello
Kristi Becker, Klavier

Amnesisch Blau
2001
pno, vn, va, vc
00:12:00
WP 2003-06-13
Oetkerhalle, Bielefeld, Germany
Ensemble Horizonte

Sepia
2008
fl, cl, pno, vn, vc
00:12:00
WP 2008-11-24
Akademie für Tonkunst, Darmstadt, Germany
Ensemble Phorminx

Lethe
2015
fl, cl, perc, pno, vn, vc
00:12:00

Nachbild
2022
fl, cl, perc, pno, vn, vc | playback (8ch)
WP 2026-03-12
Teatro Juan del Enzina , Salamanca, Spain
00:10:00

Restlicht
2025
fl, cl, perc, pno, vn, va, vc | playback (8ch)
00:10:00

A layer is added every seven years.

Every seven years the piece is revised.
Why every seven years?
From marriage, we know about the notorious seventh year.
Biologically: the maximum life expectancy of certain cell types is about seven years.
Esoteric teachings say that every seven years one changes one’s life and receives a new life theme.

Looking at my personal biography, there is actually some truth to that. When I wrote the first version of this cycle in 1994, I was 28 years old, so I had survived “Club 27” and my first daughter was born. If you go back from there in steps of 7 years, you get to the year 1966, in which I was born. And for me at least, that was a decisive turning point in my life.

This cycle was not a concept but simply came about for some reason. I only recognized it in retrospect. I discovered the connection with my birth year by chance.

Still, the very first piece already dealt with the past and with memory. Memories function like filters of our past. Such filtering processes are reflected as compositional techniques of blurring in my piece: these are e.g. glissando al niente or selective fading out of chords (individual notes in rhythm). The first piece is called disappear but written “d is appear”. That is, “d appears.” The temporality of lived experience is compressed into a holistic whole without time. Often a single element (an image, a smell) stands in for the entire experience. Yet at the time of the experience this element may have been completely unimportant, and only later in memory detached itself, like the sepia effect of old photographic prints, where the black parts fade to brown through UV light and the white of the paper turns darker over time. In the process the motif becomes increasingly blurred and only certain elements of the image remain, like the d that reappears again and again in my piece.
A musical technique in my piece that reflects this is continuous tonal spaces, such as the chromatic total, of which only parts are acoustically rendered. For example, at the end there is a passage where the instruments traverse the entire register with a glissando from high to low, but individual sections of this movement are cut out. Despite these pauses, the listener completes the motion into a whole. In Gestalt psychology this is called the “law of closure.” Missing parts of a perceptual whole are filled in by perception, and incomplete figures are perceived as belonging together.
And that, in turn, I could already take this as a life motto for myself, something that goes beyond the seven years and could make another revision every seven years meaningful: the search for and discovery of beauty and richness in the imperfect.

Achim Bornhoeft (2008)