On November 24 last year in the Quartz in Brest, the Ensemble Sillages gave the first performance of Cuarteto de cuerdas n. 2 for string quartet, commissioned by the French Ministry of culture. The composition will be played again by the same artists on April 15 in the Église de Saint-Merry in Paris, during the series “Les Rendez-Vous Contemporains de Saint-Merry”. The composer introduces his new work: «My second quartet takes its inspiration from some extracts from canto VI of the book Altazor by Vicente Huidobro: a poetic pretext to conceive the sonorities that characterize the three movements. These phrases, taken out of their context, are used as the title of each movement: the first, “Así viajamdo, en postura de ondulación” (“travelling this way, with undulating posture”) describes the simplest gestural element of the work and gives impulse to the whole composition. For this movement I invented a special bow attack that I have called “ruotato”, which involves a rotating movement using 60% of the wood of the bow and 40% of the hair. This produces a particular timbre as well as an “undulating” gesture that acts as the multidimensional exploratory “image” of the various purely musical materials of this movement. The second movement is titled “En la seda cristal nube” (“in the silken crystal cloud”). The allusion to the image is evident to the listener. The whole movement is presented as an extension of the exploration of the various techniques of pizzicato already introduced in the Cuarteto n. 1 and in the Tres Estudios for violin, in which the players use both hands. The predominant use of pizzicato constitutes an important contrast with the previous movement. The control of the density of the sound events is so important as to involve accumulations and rarefactions calculated algorithmically. They transform the spectral luminosities of the first movement by substitution: they are filtered by the instruments of the quartet with sounds obtained by playing behind the bridge. The title of the last movement, “Cristal si cristal era” (“Crystal if crystal it was”) alludes to the idea of the multidimensional crystallization that starts from the same materials used in my previous work (Estudio n. 2 violin). The material of this last movement is presented alongside other elements from the previous movements, sometimes explicitly, but always transformed by superimpositions, condensations and rarefactions».