String Quartet No. 1

In this piece, commissioned by the WDR and premiered by the Quatuor Diotima in Witten in 2016, Johannes Boris Borowski shows that, to him, the string quartet genre is a rewarding field of experimentation despite any past history: A separate architecture emerges from the contrasting of noise and sound-oriented music, an architecture which causes either rather active or rather passive listening, depending on the music's consistency. The composer got his extra-musical inspiration from Dostoyevsky's 'The Brothers Karamasov': Its hypnotic detailed drama, the rhythmic change in narrative perspective and the interconnection of crime, development and romantic novel creates a similar audience expectation.