Ruya Kapani

Rüya Kapanı — a dream-trap — is a four-minute string quartet written in Istanbul in 2016 and premiered that April by Mehmet Yasemin, İmge Tilif, Filip Kowalski and İndira Mas.

The Turkish title is the thing you are supposed to hang above a bed so that the bad dreams are caught in it and the good ones slip through. The quartet is built like one: a web of sustained harmonics and barely-bowed open strings, through which short, sharp figures — a pizzicato snap, a slap on the fingerboard, a quick descending scale — try to pass. Some get through and become melody; most are caught, and hang in the texture, repeating more and more faintly until they are indistinguishable from the web itself.

It is one of my earliest surviving pieces, and the first in which I found the thing I have kept doing since: treating a piece as a net for whatever is trying to cross it.