Enrico Chapela

Melate Binario

In many of his works, the young Mexican composer Enrico Chapela takes pleasure in the playful and sensuous side of serial composing. For example, the commission to compose a double quartet inspired him to develop an idea according to which the exponentiated character of the two groups consisting of four string instruments each - a quartet 'raised to the power of 2' so to speak - should be displayed structurally, and so he invented a crossword puzzle ('Crucigrama') which he then retranslated into musical parameters. 'Melate Binario', on the other hand, which owes its name to a Mexican lottery, is characterised by humorous aleatorism: a Mozart-like 'musical dice game' of the digital age. The 8 parts of the work have been designed as a dodecaphonic and tonal variant each and can thus be arranged in 2 to the power of 8 = 256 different combinations from which the performer can let the audience select a version by means of a lottery coupon...