Introduction

Thresholds magic - a keyword from Walter Benjamin's Passagenwerk - became the title of an essay by Volker Demuth that ignited the idea for this string quartet (in: Lettre International 73). The threshold as a moment of upheaval, of change, of the prospect of a new space, of the possibility of an unimagined view. The composition leads from threshold to threshold in disparate sound spaces. The two components change their characteristics in the process: While the sound spaces have a specific emotional and tonal character, but remain almost static, the thresholds show similarities in the situation, which is, however, highly dynamically moving.