In his (incomplete) series of Harvard Lectures Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino discusses several literary qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. Calvino surveys a wide historical range of poetry and prose, revealing these qualities in the topics of enquiry, but also in the quality of the prose. My work unfolds continuously in nine sections, each of which explores a different metaphor for the string quartet: light, weight, arabesque, multiplicity, transparency, intensity, fire, stillness, velocity.

Nine Memos is dedicated to the Arditti Quartet.