Contra-Dicción (2001)
(for 2 violas)

Contradicción means contradiction; contra dicción, separated into two words, means argument. Two violas, two identical instruments, stand opposite each other, each at one end of the hall or stage, with the audience sitting between them. In each of the three movements, a spatial-musical dialog with vocabulary of a characteristic overall sound is constructed. However, the composition was a small journey into the unknown: I only determined the basic characteristics of the respective overall sound, and let the vocabulary develop itself during the writing process, without planning a large-scale formal progression beforehand. This was an important turning point in my compositional approach to form, which has since developed from the inside to the outside, from the relationships between the small building blocks to the large-scale formal proportions and not the other way around.

Through this approach, a small homage to the famous contradictory motto of the late Luigi Nono: “No hay caminos, hay que caminar” (“There are no paths, you have to walk”), from which the titles of the individual movements originate.

Contra-dicción was written for and dedicated to Konrad von Coelln and Christoph Rabbels in 2001, who premiered the work at Robert Schumann Hochschule Düsseldorf in 2001.

Elena Mendoza