I’m very honoured to get the chance to work with the renowned Quatour Diotima.
The quartet will perform my newest string quartet “Metaxy”, which I wrote specifically for them.
When I first learned that I was to write a piece for Quatuor Diotima, the name of the quartet intrigued me. Diotima? Who, or what, is that?
I quickly found that Diotima was a priestess and philosopher of ancient Greece, mentioned briefly in Plato’s Symposium. Diotima had two main philosophies: one about Eros (love), both as a personification (the god) and as a concept; the other about Metaxy, or the “in-between.” Diotima would question classical binary oppositions, e.g. light/dark, good/bad ect., but rather than distinguishing the two, be interested in how the two opposites are connected, arguing that every opposite, contains some of it’s opposition and that the most interesting things happen in the in-between spaces. The idea of Metaxy later inspired modern philosophers and has been described by Michael P. Federici and Eric Voegelin as: The permanent in-between structure of existence. Sometimes referred to as the “between” or “in-between,” meaning that humans live within a structure of reality that is between the poles of existence. Thus, Metaxy became the inspiration for this piece, where fluctuations between static and flowing, scream and muffled, constricted and open, are examinated as they blend into one another.
The piece will be premiered by Quatuor Diotima at Ny Sal, the Royal Danish Academy of Music on November 26th 2024
