Enregistrement : Irvine Arditti, Mode Records, New York, 1995.

The piece was written in 1985, a year after the Argentinean writer Julio Cortázar died in Paris and it’s dedicated to his memory.

This work combines ‘open’ and ‘closed’ structural forms: that is, music whose structure is partly determined by the composer and partly left to the choice of the performer. The piece consists of seven sections; sections 2, 4, and 7 themselves consist of two alternative passages, only one of which is to be performed. The remaining sections are to be performed in the normal way.

While writing this piece, Paredes encountered a poem entitled Poesía permutante by Cortázar. This poem consists of a series of four lined stanzas designed to be read in any order. Because of the realities of grammar and syntax, the stanzas nevertheless form a larger poem which maybe circular, but which always moves and develops in a distinct direction. Cortázar has therefore to compose each stanza, or unit, so that: “it could satisfactorily receive the previous unit…and pass the torch on no less satisfactorily to the next…Each basic unit demands completely different material which at the same time must form a part of the total unit of the poem”.

These ideas mirrored Paredes’ own thoughts on composing alternative passages of music, each of which could fit equally validly into, as it were, fixed narrative elements. Where Cortázar cross-pollinates his stanzas with images and rhymes, Paredes’ music repeatedly focuses on the pitches of the open strings of the violin.

This provides harmonic material, which not only links the opening of the piece to each of the alternative codas, but also forms a central genetic pool of material which relates each section to the others.

Paredes was fascinated with the idea of a game with strict rules but unpredictable consequences. Though thinking in terms of games, Paredes in no way wished to trivialize the composer’s task. On the contrary: she appeals to a profound sense and powerful element in the human experience-fortunes are won, and lives ruined by the rules of indeterminate games of chance and as Cortázar puts it: “There is nothing more rigorous than a game: children respect the rules of their games with an earnestness which they do not accord to the rules of grammar”.