It begins with a fanfare, which - in order to be interpreted correctly - must also be played with a dash of irony, and here, too, a hint of anti-war sentiment comes through, disguised in the mask of seemingly harmless playfulness. In the third movement, a mobile, a constructional principle comes into play that is repeated in a similar manner in later compositions. It is the permanent modification of a small multi-tone model, a cell, which always sounds different and new with constantly changing rhythms. In this way, the music is reduced to a perpetual metamorphosis of small, manageable sound nuclei. Just as in Alexander Calder's mobiles in the visual arts there are never the same repetitions within the almost infinite series of possible constellations, so here with Hummel there is almost never a return of the same constellations.

Klaus Hinrich Stahmer (in "Chamber Music as a Personal Confession", Tutzing, 1998)