CAVEMAN for String Quartet

This piece is a child of the COVID era. I feel that very clearly, even though I cannot fully explain myself in what way that period influenced its creation.

Until I wrote this piece, I had been in a creative crisis that lasted over three years. For a young person who had composed purely for pleasure since youth and—on the advice of those around him, who felt his style fit into the contemporary music scene—had gone to an academy, this three-year gap, this powerlessness of being unable to complete a work, felt at the very beginning of adulthood like a signal that he would probably never become a professional composer—a deep sense of despair.

During this time, I sought inspiration elsewhere: I went to France to study historical composition, and after enrolling in a creative writing program, I wrote poems, short stories, and critiques incessantly for a while. And then, when all classes took place online due to the COVID lockdown and my body moved only in a regular rhythm between my apartment and the library, something seized me—and I completed this piece in just two weeks. It was the first finished work in three years.

Apparently, this piece required two breakthroughs: first, I chose a narratively structured form, in which—similar to a serialized novel—one block follows another, and I aligned my working rhythm consistently with this “novelistic” method. Second, I radically reduced the material: a homogeneous sound body (string quartet), almost no extended techniques, and a rhythmic language largely based on sixteenth notes.

Whether this is due to the method, my state of mind during COVID, or simply reflects my own style, I do not know; but when I listen to the piece, I still feel an energy trying to break through—an urge, a surge, a rising up.