Eotvos: String Quartets

Péter Eötvös continues the great musical tradition of symbiosis of text and music, indeed in many of his works he creates a causal relationship between music and words. He mines the text of the composition to create from it the musical raw material of the work. In his Mese (Tale) of 1968 he wove the polyphonic structure of the composition from a recording of a Hungarian folk tale played at various speeds. Since then, indulging his inclination to experiment, he has for almost every work found a new method of creating music from text. Neither is the wide variety of languages chosen incidental, for different languages exert different influences on the timbre, rhythm, intervallic structure of the music produced – and even its form…