The Subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel Roland Barthes,“The Pleasure of the Text” (1973)

Corde Vocale – String Quartet # 1 was composed from November 20th to December 28th of 2005. In this work, Lara explored the very personal subject matter of multilingual systems. Having left his native Brazil ten years prior and lived in five cities in three distinct countries, thoughts and ideas come to him in various languages and they remain in that particular idiom without necessarily having to be translated to the “mothertongue” Portuguese in order to disperse their fullest content.

Similar processes occur in this work, only now language becomes a metaphor for style/genre – or even more specifically certain techniques associated with them. The three musical languages Lara refers to in this piece are what Mobile (intervallic permutations of musical objects), Electro-Acoustic (noise, spectral, timbre/harmony, modulations), and Tonecolor/ Gesture. He does not intend to create eclectic juxtapositions or stylistic superimpositions, but rather to negotiate the otherness of each distinct style, and to unify radically distinct musical syntaxes. This open-sesame of Babel opens otherwise impossible connections and along with them creates new compositional problems. The often discussed issues in contemporary music regarding the lack of a supposedly lost musical lingua-franca are not to be taken lightly (from musical notation/performance to aesthetics), however those asymmetrical networks instigated by multi-lingual incompatibilities create extremely fruitful perforations on his musical discourse. The title would translate to 'vocal chords' in English, but in Italian (similarly in Spanish and Portuguese) would to 'vocal strings'.