Las Lagrimas de un Angel

The origin of this work is situated in a double project: 

A Metaphoric one at first; in the continuity of my chamber concerto for flute and ensemble " Sanaalijal ", conceived as a desire of memory towards the journalist Hanà Tserensodnom, expelled from Belgium and living now as a persona non grata with a constant death thread in her country (Mongolia). For this new quartet, i was struck by the story of a young Ecuadorian girl, Angelica, living for a long time in my countryco. She was in trapped in 2007 in a center for illegal immigrant. Her tears moved me in the point to compose a work of which the writing and the musical strategies owed my point of view on the thing.

A Musical project then ; because my esthetic position consists for many years in feeding me with extra-European musics, "digesting" them and synthesizing them under the shape of a dialectic with the technical practices of the western musical writing. In this quartet I analyzed by means of computer some sounds recorded during rituals in Ecuador : people performing big seashells - pututus – and producing very strange tones. So, the samples of these sounds revealed remarkable spectral properties, particularly phenomena of distortions and interferences stemming from these tones. The analysis of these properties are at the basis of the compositional process in the quartet, unsing microtonality, and imagining some progressive « distortions fo distortions » in order to go back to some stability. Also a way to express the richness of the relations between european thoughs and non-european ones, without exclusion.

" Las Lagrimas of an angel " was co-commissioned by the Danel Quartet and Brussels Bozar. This third string quartet was premiered in March 2008 by the dedicatee of the work in the framework of a two year residence in BOZAR.