Commissioned By:	Commissioned by JACK and the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik with friendly support of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council

First performance: 05 May 2017, Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik, JACK quartet

Pathos of Distance invites us into a world where distance is not emptiness but a gesture of care. The title echoes Nietzsche, for whom respect means to step back, to look from afar, to give space. Composed in 2017, in a Europe marked by migration and the tensions it provoked, the work intertwines ethical, ritual, and political dimensions by letting otherness resonate at the very core of the music.

That otherness takes shape in the Wald Teufel — a humble, “poor man’s” echo of the violin family, an archaic instrument carrying the spirit of forgotten rites. Placed within the Rolls Royce of chamber music, the string quartet, it rattles, unsettles, and cracks open the huis clos of refinement. Its disruptive presence unsettles and reshapes the quartet itself: the cello, detuned, grows dark and rapacious; the viola, under the same preparation, suddenly fragile. Familiar voices are bent, distorted, transformed — as if the quartet’s polished surface could no longer resist the intrusion.

Here precision and chance collide. Resonances burst open, rhythms fracture, the sound itself slips into unpredictability. Out of this tension, the quartet shapes a landscape where distance is not absence but energy — where listening becomes an act of recognition.