Lines & Arcs was the first work I wrote for the Belgian Spectra Ensemble, in 2005. Around March this year, they asked me to write a new work for their program for the winter of 2008-2009, in which they perform Beethoven's last string quartet Opus 132. Together with that 15th quartet, with its famous last movement 'Heiliger Dankgesang', Spectra is going to perform four new works, one companion for every movement.

Conductor /composer Filip Rathé commissioned me to write a comment on the first movement. Out of esteem I decided not to go standing too close to Beethoven. Instead, in Cloud Chamber I am looking at the master from a great distance – just like his contemporary Caspar David Friedrich puts the ‘Rückenfiguren’ in his paintings: as a small anonymous silhouet, in rear view, and as part of a vast, nebulous and sublime landscape.

Spectra is performing this program six times all together in November and February, in different venues all over Flanders. The work is dedicated to Richard Rijnvos and John Snijders.