Das Streichquartett N°1 "Die Lyra des Äolus" represents a paraphrase of the classical form of a string quartet: 4 movements are to be performed without interruption. The instruments are "sound sculptures", which in their respective size, reproduce the relationship between violin, viola and cello.

In January 1990, while "recovering" from a rather problematic event at the Nationalgalerie Berlin, I began collecting various materials left over from my aeolian project called VENTI (an installation for 20 wind-harps and 40 players) that were scattered all over the place, covering the walls and filling the corners of my atelier.
Just for fun I happened to put together an object made of five metal rods clamped onto an appropriate resonating body; I called the assemblage "Aeolus' Lyre" and offered it to Gerd Rische, a Berliner friend and a faithful supporter of my musical/constructivistic line.
In spite of my previous intention — expressed in a short dedication — that the piece should never be exposed to the public, I later found a possible interpretation of the idea — and that happens very often, not only with matters relating to music! — precisely in the infidelity to the idea itself.
As a consequence I decided to replicate the object — actually to multiply it by four — and, as an "informal" homage to a classic musical form, the string quartet, I set it for the stage.
Almost a Nemesis: I happened to perpetrate an equivalent unfaithfulness against the material and its complicated physical behaviour, when I let a rod play the role of a string — such a stubborn and inharmonic folk rods are! (an example: should you slightly press a rod at one third of its length, you would never get the fifth of its fundamental tone, as you probably would from a civilized string; but, were your rod in a pleasurable mood, with good luck, just its octave).
Both dialectic and defiant, supported by a glorious medieval tradition — such as contrapuntal procedures, Inversio, Diminutio, Isoritmia, Talea and so on — I decided to use a totally unimaginative traditional notation and a structurally defined form in that piece, particularly in its first movement.
An analogy to the classical features of the string quartet is also to be found in its partition into four movements (although the four movements should be performed continuously, without interruption) and in the internal constitution of them: the second movement is, for example, a paraphrase of a "pizzicato" movement, the third, a "lyric" Adagio!
Repeating a procedure that I used in another piece, QUODLIBET, dating back to August '64, whenever the rhythmical complexity requires, I allow each of the four players in turn to conduct the others by means of cues (derived from directorial practice) notated exactly in the score.
The progressive change of the graphic ciphers faithfully reflects the parallel disintegration in the structural strictness. But such a parallelism goes further: as opposed to the specific classical way of attack used in the first part, in the last movement, thanks to the peculiar quality of aeolian sounds obtained from the rods by means of compressed air jets, the "string quartet" dissolves historical formalism in an ethereal temper.

Mario Bertoncini, 1992