Intent on Resurrection - Spring or Some Such Thing (2014)
(for 17 musicians)

In Berlin, where I was composer-in-residence as part of the DAAD's Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

The Berlin winter was long - the snow only stopped whitening the city at the end of April - and in the loneliness of being a stranger once again, after Paris, in a country whose language I didn't even understand this time, I devoted myself to reading and discovered two writers who inspired my latest works: the American David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) - who guided the writing of my string quartet, A Failed Entertainment - and the Irish Dorothy Molloy (1942-2004).

The three small collections of poems by Dorothy Molloy - who died of cancer at the age of 62, just 10 days before the publication of her works - represent her journey, told with a moving yet cynical lucidity, through illness, the destruction of her body. Each poem, in fact, should be seen almost as a human body in itself, in the process of decomposing.

Into the darkness of this transformation, Dorothy Molloy introduces, from time to time, small, almost imperceptible glimmers of light, but which give a new perspective to an otherwise motionless material.