Philippe BOESMANS (born 1936). Autograph musical manuscript, Fly-Driving. String Quartet, 1989; 15 leaves (paginated [1]-4 and 6-15) 34 x 27 cm (tear repaired on f.14, small marginal cut on f.15). Boesmans' first string quartet, premiered on 23 March 1990 at the Flagey Centre in Brussels as part of the Ars Musica Festival, by the Arditti Quartet, which had premiered Driving on 17 March 1989, and which recorded the quartet (Ricercar, 1990); it was published in 1990 by Jobert [WD34]. It is divided into two parts: I Fly (p. 1-4) II Driving (p. 6-15). Dedicated "to Pat", it has 279 bars, and lasts 15 minutes 30. In the program for the premiere, Philippe Boesmans wrote: "At the time I was composing Driving, I was feeling particularly stressed and, in order to free myself from these tensions, I needed to walk a lot and to seek a certain continuity in walking, which is not always easy in a city, especially because of the traffic lights. So, to avoid stopping, to avoid breaking the continuity, I had to find systems of slowing down and speeding up [...] And it is from small simple things, from this continuous or sometimes accidentally interrupted driving, stable, slowed down or accelerated, that the most complex ideas can be born in me. The first movement, Fly, does not start from a lived experience but rather from a dream: that of flying like migrating birds that always separate and reunite. Hence the alternating homophone and heterophone character of the piece. Fly is the first movement of an introductory character, of slower tempo, composed from the harmonic and cellular material of the soothing ending of Driving The manuscript is carefully notated in Indian ink on 24-line tracing paper, usually showing 5 systems of 4 staves per page. It is dated at the end "26/1/1989". The measures are numbered. The title of each part has been printed on a collet.