inscribed, in the center: “1520, Antorff” [2014]

for string quartet

duration :: 11’

Commissioned by the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt for the MIVOS Quartet

First performance :: Mivos Quartet — Darmstadt Ferienkürse, 5 August 2014

[ MIVOS Quartet :: Centralstation Darmstadt, 5 August 2014 ]

During his storied visit to Antwerp in 1520-21, Albrecht Dürer made a sketch of fishing boats pressed up against the harbor of the river Scheldt: a diagonal line of hulls, masts and riggings, getting denser as they recede from the picture plane until they are little more than a tangle of lines. Loosely mirroring the boats, on the right side of the drawing, are the maritime buildings on shore, the counting-house, towers, walls, which—strangely—are rendered more finely and closely the further away they are from the viewer. The point at which these two nearly perpendicular diagonal axes meet is a riot of indiscernible detail.

Everything else is negative space: the land itself is just blank whiteness, as is the sky, as is the water. The narrow band of fine detail in this mostly rapidly sketched drawing is hemmed in from all directions, but more than that, it is infiltrated, eaten away from within, rendered indistinct by the actively pressing weight of the untouched expanses of paper delimiting it.

Active negative space is the material of this quartet: the silences and large-scale inactivities, of course, but also the pervasive presence of hair’s-breadth separations, vacancies, pressurelessnesses: the sounding of the instruments is not an expression of force or the presentation of material but its overcoming.