Kahlo Quartet:
After beauty

By Juan Lázaro

After the Beauty: Julián De La Chica and the Solitude of Sound

It was in a dream that Julián De La Chica first saw his String Quartet No. 1. Lying half-awake, he imagined a rose blooming between two notes — a vision at once tender and unsettling. Those paired tones, close enough to ache, became the seed of the entire work. “The beginning is everything,” he says. “The rest is just development.”
That image — the fragile flower suspended between tension and release — has followed him ever since. It has become shorthand for the sound world De La Chica has built across his career: music born of solitude, pared down to its breath.

The quartet moves with glacial slowness, almost entirely without vibrato, as if afraid to disturb the air. Its five cycles — De La Chica avoids the European term “movements” — trace the passage from the rose’s first bloom to its inevitable decay. The music asks for stillness rather than display, for silence to carry part of the meaning.
The score itself reads like a credo: “without vibrato,” “minimum weight on the bow,” “austere sound. Minimal. Worn. A resigned sound.” These are not performance directions so much as a moral stance — a sound world stripped of ornament, where fragility becomes truth. “It’s not about beauty,” De La Chica says. “It’s about what comes after the beauty — when the flower dies.”

Beneath the calm surface runs quiet extremity: long tones stretched to the edge of breath, harmonies balanced between consonance and collapse. Where others polish away imperfections, De La Chica invites them in. “I like the rawness,” he says. “Reality is life, and now it’s dying. You need to feel that in the sound.”

His insistence on near-vibrato-less tone inevitably calls to mind the inward gravity of Beethoven’s late quartets — above all the Heiliger Dankgesang, where stillness and fragile intonation become a kind of devotion. De La Chica’s sound, though born of a different century and a different landscape, shares that same sense of vulnerability turned into spiritual pressure.

String Quartet No. 1 was born in 2015 from an invitation to write for a Carnegie Hall event connected with musicians in the Philip Glass circle. “The quartet is such a responsibility,” he recalls. “It’s a sacred form.” The composer immersed himself in lineages that stare directly into silence: the late Beethoven quartets, Shostakovich’s Fifteenth, Glass’s Dracula, and Haydn’s The Seven Last Words of Christ, whose meditative restraint helped shape his own sense of how sound can hold stillness without going cold. The dream of the rose gave him his entry point — beauty already shadowed by its ending.

When the piece premiered, De La Chica felt both satisfaction and distance. The work had revealed itself, but not yet its time. He and the original players tried to record it, but the studio sound wasn’t what he was hearing internally. “It wasn’t ready,” he says. “The sound wasn’t what I heard inside.” He would wait nearly a decade for the right performers.

A Voice Beyond Borders

De La Chica’s search for sound began long before that dream. Born in Manizales, a mountain city in central Colombia, he began studying piano at the age of five. The conservatory path offered promise but also confinement. “You have a lot of noise in your mind when you leave the conservatory,” he says. “All those patriarchal ideas of what music should be. But I was missing my own voice.”
He left before graduating and began to travel — across Europe, then back through Latin America — earning the nickname el vagabundo del piano, the piano vagabond. De La Chica lived by playing, teaching, improvising. More importantly, he learned how to listen again. “It was about unlearning,” he explains. “About silence. About finding the moment when music begins inside you.”
By 2010, the composer had relocated to New York City, working day jobs while composing in a small Harlem apartment before later making his home in Brooklyn. At night he wandered. From his window he’d watch a lone figure at the corner bodega, or the pulse of lights on the elevated train. “You hear a kind of counterpoint in the city,” he says. “Every sound belongs to another rhythm.” That landscape of overlapping noise and loneliness became his true conservatory.

Out of that world came Poemas de Bar (2010), a cycle of Spanish-language songs about strangers glimpsed through the haze of bars and subway platforms — anonymous lives brushed by music. “New York is so full of people, but it’s a very lonely place,” he has said. The work lay dormant for a decade before finding its voice through mezzo-soprano Yana Mann during the pandemic. Its belated rebirth mirrored De La Chica’s belief that some works have to wait to become what they are.

At the same time, his creative reach widened. He made films (Agatha, The Experiment), wrote Preludes for Lisa Moore, and composed electronic works like Voyeuristic Images. He shot photographs, wrote poetry, scored soundtracks. “I don’t believe anymore in these divisions,” he says. “When I feel I need to use a camera or a piano, I just do it.”

On his own site, De La Chica has described his aesthetic in almost existential terms. People call it “minimalism,” but he pushes back: for him, the so-called minimal is not a style, it’s a way of being. He writes about listening at night to “the noise of my fears,” and about discovering, as a child, “that unusual place where the minimal resides.” In other words: what some hear as reduction, he experiences as exposure. His music doesn’t decorate emotion. It reveals it.

That credo runs through all his work. Whether through camera, keyboard, or quartet, De La Chica listens for the instant when sound becomes presence.

Two Quartets and a World Between

If String Quartet No. 1 reflects inward, its successor faces the world’s disarray. Composed in 2017 without commission, String Quartet No. 2 arrived during a period of exhaustion — personal, political, planetary. “Everything felt hopeless,” he recalls. “It was like watching our self-destrction in real time.”

Where the first quartet moves through cycles of birth and decay, the second starts amid ruins and simply refuses to pretend. Its structure is skeletal: silence dominates, and the few bursts of motion feel fevered, almost panicked, as if the music were trying to outrun collapse. “Maybe it’s not darker,” De La Chica says. “Maybe it’s just realistic.”

Yet even within its severity, there’s tenderness. The music moves at the rate of thought rather than pulse. Its fragility is its strength. De La Chica describes silence here as “a new luxury” — something rare, almost endangered — and the quartet is full of pauses that force you to experience that luxury. “We live surrounded by noise,” he says. “Real silence has become rare — and radical.”

De La Chica’s process demands the same radical honesty from the performers. He writes in extremely slow tempos, asking the players to sustain long notes with almost no vibrato, perfectly aligned. On paper it looks simple; in the body it’s punishing. The goal isn’t prettiness — it’s exposure. The composer even told the players, bluntly, that the sound must feel exhausted — that there should be “no hope” left in it. The quartet’s surface austerity isn’t an aesthetic stunt. It’s an ethical stance.

Around this time De La Chica wrote Summa, for string quartet and keyboard — a meditative counterpart inspired by Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica. Summa sits alongside the two quartets like a reflective coda. Here, he folds in the electronic and recorded sounds that are also part of his voice. “The keyboard gives breath to the strings,” he says. “It opens another dimension, like the spirit that moves inside the sound.”

Taken together, these three works form a kind of triptych: life, aftermath, and reflection. The first quartet traces the interior landscape; the second, the world’s fractured mirror; Summa gathers what remains into stillness. They are concise but unhurried, existing in a suspended present tense. In De La Chica’s world, silence isn’t absence — it’s the field in which sound becomes visible.

After the Beauty

De La Chica’s relationship with time is patient, almost devotional. He doesn’t rush a piece into the world. Some projects, he says, announce when they are ready — and until that moment, he holds them back. The quartets waited nearly a decade for that moment.
Several ensembles had approached him about recording the quartets, but none quite lived inside the sound he imagined. He talks about how difficult it was to find a quartet “in the middle”: not a purely canonical Beethoven/Shostakovich machine, not an aggressively experimental noise unit, but a group that understood color, pacing, and silence as living material.

That someone turned out to be the Kahlo Quartet, a New York–based ensemble whose members — Audrey Lee (United States), Manuela Romero (Cuba), Freddy Contreras (Venezuela), and Andrea Beltrán Landers (Peru) — share a mission of bridging the classical canon with the musical voices of Latin America. What mattered to De La Chica wasn’t only their programming identity but their attitude toward sound. He felt they approached the music more as philosophy than mere “performance.”

They recorded the complete cycle at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, a studio known for its intimate acoustics and unforgiving honesty. The session began before dawn and ran deep into the night — roughly 6 a.m. to almost 10 p.m. On the page, the music looks simple, but, as De La Chica remarks, “it’s so naked — very naked,” with only a few touches of vibrato allowed. The musicians repeated entire cycles to chase a precise tension between focus and fatigue.

By evening, the players were physically spent from sustaining those exposed, slow tones, and that exhaustion itself became part of the sound he wanted. De La Chica often stopped them earlier in the day when the playing sounded “beautiful,” asking instead for less polish, more surrender — until the music reached the hopeless, exposed atmosphere he had imagined on the page.

In that sense, the recording documents not just two scores and a coda, but a way of playing. It captures what the composer calls the “rawness” — the reality of something alive and already dying.
Hearing the two quartets together, one senses candor rather than despair. The first begins with birth and ends in dissolution; the second begins already amid ruins. Yet both carry the same quiet endurance — the sense that continuing to sound at all is itself an act of resistance.

De La Chica’s influences — Shostakovich’s inward gravity, Beethoven’s spiritual courage, Haydn’s restraint, Glass’s luminous patience — are all refracted here. But his own path diverges from all of them. Minimalism often builds motion; he pares it away. Romanticism swells; he lets it fade. These quartets inhabit the liminal space between expression and disappearance, faith and fatigue.

For De La Chica, the music decides its own timing. Some works wait for years — quietly — until the performers, the context, even the world itself are finally ready for them.

That belief shapes everything he does. Poemas de Bar waited ten years for its singer; these quartets waited for their players. His films and preludes evolve by seasons rather than schedules. Patience, for De La Chica, isn’t delay — it’s devotion.

And so these quartets feel less like new compositions than rediscoveries: sounds that were always there, waiting for their moment to be heard. They invite us to slow down, to notice the fragile grain of sound, the way silence holds it. Before the first note, the stillness of the hall already feels charged. The audience leans forward, uncertain if the music has begun. When it ends, that same stillness remains — transformed, resonant, full.

Two notes tremble in the dark. Between them, the rose opens once more — beautiful, dying, and utterly alive.