A Failed Entertainment (2013)
(for string quartet)

I was on a four-day train trip from San Francisco to New York when I started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I had been looking for a way — my personal way — to deal with form and time, and this book helped me, giving me a new, different perspective on them. I am not saying that my piece is related to Infinite Jest (though ‘A Failed Entertainment’ was Wallace’s working title for his novel), but that this was the impulse which led me here, a starting point for a search that will probably take me several years. I am used to working with different kinds of sound, melting them together in order to find a unique shape. What challenged me in this piece was precisely the fact that I could not work as I always do, because I had four instruments with the same sound properties. A Failed Entertainment is my first attempt at working beyond the sound itself. I am grateful to Julia Gerlach and the Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD for supporting the project, and to the musicians of Quatuor Diotima, for their commitment.