Comfortably familiar (2020)
(And peacefully numb)
String Quartet & Piano (18 min.)
Commissioned by CNDM
Premiered by Attacca Quartet & Juan Carlos Fernández Nieto on March 17th, 2025
Reina Sofía Museum Auditorium, Madrid (Spain)
About the piece:
We seek the familiar because it gives us comfort, the feeling of being safe that allows us to lower our defenses and let go, like returning to our childhood or beyond, to the placidity of floating in amniotic fluid where the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is ambiguous, and consciousness is dispensable collateral damage.
The piece has harmonic progressions from the song "Comfortably Numb" (Pink Floyd) in its DNA, although without direct melodic allusions. Both have in common the sensation of moving toward the same place through different aesthetics and discourses. A longed-for well-being, natural or artificial, but intrinsically human, in which we can place hope.
Sometimes, the spirit of Pink Floyd's work is heard without being present; the brain guesses it in its constant desire to identify patterns to orient itself in the environment.
The four piano bars at the beginning are a memory. The piano brings us the idea of nostalgia, the strings, reality. In the end, the piano follows that nostalgia, which is always more kind to the past, but the strings remind us of the impossibility of returning to the object of nostalgia and add a bittersweet flavor with the quarter-tone notes, like visiting the ruins/reality of what until then had been a cherished memory: the pain of reality, where numbness gives us peace.