I found a recording of my very first string quartet, which is now 20 years old!

While I was in my last year of secondary school, friends of mine organised a composition competition for string quartet. Never having written anything for string quartet before, I decided to prepare myself well and started listening to the CD collection of my parents. I didn't get halfway through because it's a huge collection, but that was not the plan anyway. I just needed ideas, inspiration, discovering the possibilities of this instrumentation I didn't know yet. One of the ideas came during a music history lesson (or was it music analysis?), which was the octatonic scale. Brilliant!

I still like to use it, (mostly when improvising jazz). So I used it here for the first time, and this is how the piece has gotten its name: Octopus.