Karol Beffa

Music for 4 musicians

The title says it all: Music for Four Musicians (two percussions and two pianos) draws its inspiration not from Bartok but from Reich. When the Essor quartet approached me in April 2020, at the beginning of the first lockdown, I realized this gave me the opportunity of composing for that particular instrumental combination - an opportunity I had long been waiting for.

The three movements may be played separately as freestanding elements. The first movement unfolds as a playful game of Q&A, firing away more and more rapidly. The second movement bears the indication ''dream-like" and features strict canons. In the third and last movement, the influence of contemporary music is manifest in the swaying pace and abrupt interruptions, as if peiformers turned interrupting each other into a fun game.

The whole piece is a tri bute to Steve Reich, yet without any 'literai' reference to his music. Instead, I rather tried to catch the compositional spirit of this toweringfigure of modern music: canons, phase shifts, a certain taste for hyper consonance, an attraction for keyboard instruments and percussions with constant pitches.