The Momenta Quartet performs works by Mexican microtonal maverick Julián Carrillo (1875–1965); including the Boston premieres of his string quartets nos. 1 and 4.

Julián Carrillo (1875-1965) was born in Ahualulco, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. He received his training in composition, violin, and conducting at Mexico’s Conservatorio Nacional de Música in Mexico City, the Königliches Konservatorium der Musik in Leipzig, Germany, and the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Ghent, Belgium. After his return to Mexico, he was named professor at the Conservatorio Nacional, founded the Beethoven Orchestra and the Beethoven Quartet, and became one of the most influential musicians in pre-revolutionary Mexico City. In 1924, after the Mexican Revolution, he deviced one of the first microtonal systems in the Western art music tradition; he called it El Sonido 13 (The Thirteenth Sound). From that year until the end of his life, Carrillo devoted himself to composing microtonal music, theorizing about it, and promoting his microtonal system. He died of cancer in his house of Mexico City on September 9, 1965.

Between 1903 and 1964 Carrillo composed thirteen string quartets. Notwithstanding its being a unique collection of major works for string quartet by one of Latin America’s foremost composers, this repertory has received little attention from performers and musicologists. Taken as a cycle, Carrillo’s string quartets show the diversity of aesthetic tendencies developed and embraced by the composer throughout his long artistic career. From the conservative but vibrant idiom of his early works at the beginning of the twentieth century to the modernist atonal works of the 1940s to the uncompromising microtonal avant-gardism of his last compositions in the 1960s, the wide diversity of Carrillo’s artistic voices speaks loud and clear through this extraordinary body of works.

The Momenta Quartet is embarked on a multi-annual project that had it premiere many of these works in a variety of national and international venues, including the prestigious Festival Internacional Cervantino in Guanajuato, Mexico, Mexico’s Fonoteca Nacional, the Americas Society in New York, and concerts at Cornell University, and Harvard University. Today’s concert at Harvard University features the Boston premiere of string quartets nos. 1 and 4, as transcribed from the original manuscripts by Alejandro L. Madrid.