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String Quartet No. 2, 'Sin tiempo'

Although not a large ensemble, the string quartet carries the weight of history. A tradition that was brought to a peak by Beethoven and enriched since by all the major romantic composers, and then Bartók, Shostakovich and Ligeti, has installed the genre in audiences’ minds as a vehicle for serious, concentrated thought. The current quartet is my second, the first (2007) being an elegy to the painter Fernando Montes (1930–2007). In both I fully engage with the challenge of dealing with weighty matters in an expansive spirit.

In a motivational sense this work belongs with my electroacoustic opera Teoponte (1988) and Souvenir de Teoponte (2012). Both respond to a background of political turmoil and failed insurrection. One specific episode in Bolivian history, the guerrilla campaign at Teoponte in 1970, encapsulates the dreams of a generation, its struggle to realise them, and its self-sacrifice in the attempt. I composed the opera based on the minimal sources then available: memories, press archives, conversations and one published pamphlet. Only in 2006 was the first serious monograph on the subject published: Sin tiempo para las palabras: Teoponte, La otra guerrilla guevarista en Bolivia by Gustavo Rodríguez Ostria (Cochabamba: Kipus, 2006). Had this book been available in 2012, my understanding of the episode and its background would have been substantially different, and my opera would have been the richer as a result. I am therefore revisiting some ideas from the opera from new angles. The first movement evokes an imagined Inca prophesy of a future of constant revolution. The second applies again the structure based on a four-chord cycle. The last movement starts from a texture translated from the opera’s tape part and develops it instrumentally, exploring related ideas of urgency and violence.

Premiere: 13 November by Momenta Quartet at Williams College, Massachusetts.