I. Hatch

II. Match

III. Mismatch

IV. Scratch

@ch is a circular musical journey, divided into four consecutive movements. In the first movement Hatch all the instruments are playing as if they are inside an unhatched eggshell: the piano is damped, the clarinet is using the slap tongue technique and the cello has only pizzicatos to play. At the beginning of the second movement Match the music hatches out from the damped sound world when the piano plays for the first time a trill with normal, clear sound. Later all the instruments are occasionally as if glued together in a rhythmic unison. This state of uniformity is totally broken in the next movement Mismatch, when all the instruments play a complex canon using simultaneously different tempi and time signatures. The last movement Scratch turns again away from the normal, clear pitch into more noisy sounds and the work ends in a similar situation as it started. As the title @ch might suggest, the musical notes C and B (in German H) play an important role in various aspects of this work. TR, 2021