The String Quartets No. 2, 3 and 7 cover a large temporal range of my creative work, which would suggest that there is a difference as a result of the great leap in time. But they are not so different. They are only perceived differently in the difference in the way in which they are shaped. What all the works have in common is that they have a clear architecture of form, which is only haptically obscured by the simultaneity of different time layers and their different speeds of progression. This layering creates a structural complexity that eludes immediate hearing. All of these string quartets are also similar in that they come at the end of respective work sections or creative periods. As the supreme discipline of all musical genres, their perfection allows the highest quality aesthetic expression of a musical idea. The string quartet completely avoids the primarily and foremost zeitgeist-oriented formulation of musical processes based on quantities alone. Composing for a string quartet is necessarily heterogeneous and discontinuous and not linear in a redundantly abbreviated way. For this ›final‹ The paradigmatic finding is the Big gap Beethoven. I have used this knowledge as a composer and used it as a guide for an empathetic discourse when composing string quartets in the discipline that continues to fascinate me.
The String Quartet No. 7 is a commission from the NeoQuartet from Gdansk, financed by the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. It is dedicated to the excellent NeoQuartet.
Ernest Helmuth Flammer