Cuadernos XXI

This quartet is composed by 8 pieces, plus one interruption and one final intromission. Like many of the other pieces that I composed, this work also tries to establish a kind of open dialog with different compositions of another composers. In some strange way this piece speaks with the Quartet for the end of time (1941) of Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). Some of this 8 numbers emerges and proliferates from the extirpation of some raw materials from the piece of Olivier Messiaen. Maybe I wrote some of this pieces thinking in Messiaen, or, maybe, listening to his music. Maybe it was like a homage. Maybe only to remember what I am doing. Maybe only to be with someone else in the solitary process of starting a new piece. Each movement of this work could be taken as a fragment of distant and heterogeneous music that arrives to our ears through a gust of wind. And, now and here, we listen them and we put them together
into this work. But: "As soon as we express something, we diminish it strangely. We think we have dived to the depth of the abysses, and when we reach the surface again the drop of water glittering at the end of our pale fingers no longer resembles the sea it came from." This quot is from Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) and it was the epigraph selected by Robert Musil (1880-1942) for his novel "The Confusions of Young Torless" (1906).