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REGARDS — Mirrors and Transparencies
String Quartet No. 2 — 2026
Explore the movements: Overture · Stirrings · Shifts · Mirrors and Transparencies
REGARDS – Mirrors and Transparencies grew out of a long familiarity with the string quartet, its balances and tensions, and above all its extraordinary possibility: to be four, yet form a single instrument.
Four Movements, One Transformation
REGARDS unfolds in four movements: Overture · Stirrings · Shifts · Mirrors and Transparencies. They are not four independent episodes. From one movement to the next, the musical material changes. What seemed solid may fracture; a single voice emerges from a collective texture; opposing elements may suddenly reflect one another. Gradually, the writing becomes more open.
Overture
The quartet first appears as a shared substance. All four instruments are present, closely bound together, yet their individual identities are already beginning to surface. Tensions arise and directions emerge. This overture does not truly announce what follows: it brings the forces into play.
Stirrings
The title deliberately suggests a plurality of feelings. It does not name one particular emotion, but the movements emotion sets in motion: disturbance, tension, impulse, restraint and vulnerability. The musical material grows more mobile. Instruments respond to and interrupt one another; one voice may emerge, only to be taken up or transformed by another. Emotion is not narrated. It acts upon the writing.
Shifts
Here, transformation itself becomes the subject. Roles circulate. Musical material passes from one instrument to another, changing along the way, acquiring a different function or colour. The concertante principle gradually becomes more perceptible: each instrument can step forward for a moment without interrupting the shared movement.
The quartet’s identity no longer comes from the unison of four voices, but from their ability to transform one another.
Mirrors and Transparencies
The final movement gives the entire work its subtitle. The voices now have more room to breathe. They reflect one another without necessarily imitating one another; at times they allow something of the other to pass through them without losing their own presence. A mirror is not a faithful reproduction. Transparency is not disappearance. Both become different ways of looking — and perhaps of listening.
The work does not seek a conventional resolution. Instead, it moves towards an opening: allowing what was contained in the material from the beginning to become visible.
At the Heart of Emotion
Micro-intervals have a particular place in REGARDS. I do not use them as a system, nor as an added colour. They appear when expression seems to belong between two pitches, in a space where the tempered note no longer quite suffices.
For me, they are connected with extreme emotional states, often deeply intimate. They can bend a line, make tension almost physical, or destabilise a note that seemed secure. They do not decorate emotion: they are part of it.
REGARDS — detail from the score. Micro-intervals are woven into the movement of the four voices.
Mirrors and Ways of Seeing
The title came late, giving a name to something already present in the music. A gaze is never entirely neutral. It transforms what it observes, and depends on the person looking. Perhaps the same is true of a string quartet.
Four musicians read the same score, but each receives it from a different position. Together, they must build an interpretation that does not erase their individual identities.
This is the tension that interests me: remaining oneself while belonging to something shared.
Perhaps this is where the work’s mirrors and transparencies ultimately lie.
Why the String Quartet?
The string quartet has been part of my musical life since long before I thought of writing one. My father was a cellist and chamber musician. This ensemble belonged to the musical landscape of my childhood.
Much later, in my opera L’Amazone, the quartet became a kind of human instrument for me: four voices capable of travelling through different registers, merging or becoming distinct.
Then came Un Quatuor Arménien. And finally REGARDS.
From one work to another, my relationship with the quartet has changed. I am no longer concerned only with what four instruments can say together, but with what happens between them: exchanges, resistance, echoes, silences and spaces left open.
A History with the Akhtamar Quartet
My relationship with the Akhtamar Quartet did not begin with REGARDS. I saw the ensemble come into being, then followed it over the years, through its transformations, explorations and development.
Its very name connects us: Akhtamar was already the title of a work I had written for guitar, and later of a recording. That music, and everything it carried of my connection with Armenia, accompanied the quartet’s first steps.
In 2016, Un Quatuor Arménien marked a first stage in our shared history. Ten years later, when I began REGARDS, I knew the musicians differently. I had heard their sound evolve, observed how they breathed together, their individualities and the ways in which they could come together.
I have sometimes said that I wrote this work “to the quartet, about the quartet, and for the quartet”.
This does not mean that the work belongs exclusively to them. Quite the opposite: once written, it must be able to encounter other quartets, revealing different balances and different perspectives with each.
The Akhtamar Quartet. Photograph: Studio Kravat.
REGARDS – Mirrors and Transparencies
String Quartet No. 2 — 2026
Overture – Stirrings – Shifts – Mirrors and Transparencies
Duration: 25–30 minutes
Composed for the Akhtamar Quartet
Dedicated to Dr Patrick Alécian
SACEM / ISWC: T-338.687.525.4