Daniele Di Virgilio - Sine me-moria for string quartet (2024)
performed by Vacuum Quartet (live recording)
Gleb Khokhlov, violin
Alexander Malomozhnov, violin
Emil Salaridze, viola
Julia Migunova, cello

The piece musically investigates the different nuances that the ability to bring to mind a memory corroded by time can take on. Sine memoria (from Latin, “without memory”) is a concept that takes on different meanings, it expands to embrace the relationship between being and one's identity, between being and one's survival. In fact, the vanishing or the clouding of an important memory also coincides with the loss of a part of oneself, of something that contributed in the past to forging our identity (sine me, "without me"); from this perspective, the ability to remember becomes an indispensable means for the preservation of our ego (sine moria, "without death").
Sine memoria is therefore metaphorically a struggle for the preservation and survival of a memory, which in the composition is musically represented by the Cavatina of the quartet op. 130 by Beethoven.

In the Preludium the cello (the Ego) is initially alone on stage, while it exposes some thematic elements of the composition; in moments of pause, fragments of the Cavatina played by the off-stage string trio can be heard in the distance, representing the fading memory. Upon entering the scene, the trio preserves the harmonic echo of the Cavatina, until it disappears and merges thematically with the cello: the event has become a memory, merging with the Ego.
From Sine me to Sine moria the Ego undertakes a journey of corrosion and re-appropriation of memory, in which the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic elements of the Cavatina blend with foreign thematic material, musically creating new relationships and new meanings.
The process of definitive reconciliation is completed in the Postludium, where the initial situation is reversed: the harmonies of the memory reverberate and separate from the quartet, which the string trio slowly leads off stage. At this point, among the increasingly rarefied interventions of the cello solo, we hear a last short fragment of the Cavatina, a brief jolt of the enlightened memory.


Sine me-moria for string quartet (2024)

Daniele Di Virgilio is an Italian Berlin-based composer and perpetual researcher. Conceiving composition as a multi-disciplinary and social-oriented expression, his music is inspired by a theatrical imagination and by the interest in psychoanalysis.