Qasida

Year: 2026

Duration: c. 6 minutes

Instrumentation: string quartet (2vln, vla, vc)

Premiere information: 19 June 2026, Italian Cultural Institute, Mexico City

Andres Becerril - violin 1
Helena Muntaner Payeras - violin 2
Maddy Nicolescu - viola
Manuel Garnica - cello

Notes: “Qasida” gets its title from a ancient Arabic word and form of poetry which features monometer and monorhyme. The skeleton of the piece follows a system of dependent relationships between each instrument’s pitch and bow placement, corresponding to the four corners of a moving square on an XY plane. As the square revolves and rotates around itself, the consequences are felt in the notes and the playing technique of the instruments.

I like that this deterministic way of writing, like a classical qaṣīda, more or less lets you know from the beginning how the piece will play out. It allows me as a composer some amount of peace and predictability in a frequently chaotic and emotion-driven field; as a listener, it lets me access beautiful, alien structures that I otherwise would not have written.

“Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.” ― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time