Le Détour Permet le Retour: five movements for string quartet

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I. le détour permet le retour

At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death, you numberlesse infinities
Of soules, and to your scattered bodies goe

-John Donne, from At the round earth's imagined corners

II. abstract/anti-abstract

"...precise means create indeterminate emotions..."

-Morton Feldman

III. the beating of my heart keeps me from sleeping

"Sacrificial remains make it hard to forget where you come from..."

-Lou Reed/John Cale, from The Black Angel's Death Song

IV. reminiscence, as an adult, of sounds and images unrecognised as a young child

Give it up and spit on rhymes and arias and the rose bush and other such mawkishness
Who gives a damn now about-"Ah, wretched soul, how he loved, how he suffered..."?
Listen, the locomotives groan: "Give us coal, give us metal"
While we quarrel in search of fundamental answers all things yell: "Give us new forms!"

-Vladimir Mayakovsky, extracts from Order #2 to the Army of the Arts

V. slight return

I want to learn more and more to see the necessary character of things as beautiful;
then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth!
I do not want to wage war with what is ugly. I do not want to accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.
But all in all I wish henceforth to be only a yea-sayer.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Joyful Wisdom