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Those who have seen the Quartetto Maurice play live have seen this on their faces, in their gestures: the long sweetness and the angry acceleration, the smile and the serenity, the eurhythmy and the euphoria. The latter has often accompanied their wish that everything should change. We know that when we want everything to change, we evoke fire. Flame, Bachelard writes in an essay, is of all the objects that evoke reverie, one of the greatest operators of images: flame forces us to imagine. This is a truth that Fausto Romitelli knew well. Referring precisely to the synthetic work Natura morta con fiamme (1991), for string quartet and electronics, he explicitly refers to an imaginary scale, to an extremity which has a language without words, purely of relations, of which the essential elements are conventional and abstract, implemented by algebraic and combinatory processes. Dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli, the piece by Mauro Lanza, The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident (2017), for “augmented” string quartet, reflects precisely on what lies beyond what we always see – on the eye forced to watch and the ear forced to listen – we could almost say on the reverie that admires interference. Andrea Agostini conceived Legno, sabbia, vetro, cenere (2009-10), for quartet and electronics. The composer formed the idea of using additive and deferred synthesis– a technique that the composer is pleased to describe as “very old” – to pursue an ideal he never then abandoned. This was writing electronics with a degree of control over detail and articulation of sound that aspires, one could say, to a very marked musical determinism. Silvia Borzelli searches for a profound explanation with Earwitness (familiar 2) (2017), for string quartet and stereo soundtracks. The earwitness of the title is the person described by Elias Canetti in that strange collection of stories that take their name exactly from the story of that name.