New Music By Karlheinz Essl

Performed by the Arditti Quartet on Nov 1st, 2001 at Konzerthaus Vienna during the festival Wien modern. Binaural recording - listen with headphones! http://www.essl.at/works/upward.html In his story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges tells of a fictional culture whose language has no nouns at all: "There is no word that corresponds to the word 'moon', but there is a verb that would be 'lunare' in Latin or ‘to moon' in our language. ‘The moon rose above the river’ reads: blör u fang axaxcas mlö or in exact order of the words: 'Empor hinter dauer-fließen mondet'es (Xul Solar translates in a short form: upa tras perfluyue lunó. Upward, behind the onstreaming it mooned)." In this language, the simplest statements can only be expressed through complicated grammatical constructions, which are, however, full of poetry and magic, as in the example quoted above, to which my quartet owes its title. The string quartet has always been regarded as the supreme discipline of composition