On September 24 2009 in the Stadtforum in Innsbruck, during the Festival Klangspuren Schwaz, the Arditti Quartet played the Cuarteto de cuerdas n. 1 for string quartet, commissioned by Irvine Arditti and the Festival Klangspuren. The composer comments: «Like Sinfonía mixta, written between 2006 and 2007, the first quartet reflects my interest in an idea of global structure that, thanks to a continuous reinterpretation of its proportions, allows parallel processes to be generated. As a sort of counterpoint, a second level, characterized by processes divergent from the above mentioned mechanisms, displays my interest in a work that contains within it the idea of opposition between global symmetry and internal asymmetry. A further analogy with Sinfonía mixta comes from the fact that I have created, sometimes consciously, sometimes inevitably, a synthesis of the ideas that have characterized my music over the last years. In works of this type it is impossible not to consider their relation with the great tradition of music. There are, in fact, allusions in the division into five movements (like Bartók’s IV and V Quartet and Ligeti’s Second Quartet), in the global idea of formal balance and also in an idea that goes beyond the literature purely for string quartet, that is the use of the golden number as a determining factor for the proportions of the musical structure. It is possible in fact to observe a clear tendency for the structures to shrink towards the middle, only to expand again towards the end. In this quartet the analogy between the general form and the primary musical objects stems from the principle of reinterpretation of the characteristics and of the general structural proportions considered within a self-generating mechanism. The divergent processes superimposed over the basic structure are responsible for the individual characteristics of each of the five movements. The wish to establish the global form with the material and musical objects is contrasted by the idea of superimposing mobile materials and forms that themselves constitute multidirectional structures and processes. It is as if a fragment of a logarithmic spiral was running back and forth, giving rise, in great quantity, to divergent ramifications, complex labyrinths whose introspective gaze is turned towards the music itself».