The four instruments in Lara's quartets coalesce, liquidly diverge, fragment, and reform in waves. The voice is not that of one of a coterie of bewigged eighteenth-century gentlemen, existing as discourse only insofar as it is conversing, but an unnamable subterranean force, unitary, somehow violent and monstrous but at the same time (like all the best monsters) fundamentally human.

Lara's work is always in motion, except for the exceptionally tense passages, primarily in Archi elastici, where it is not, where time is what moves instead. Everything about Lara's work points in this direction: life is movement, expression is torsion, singing and speaking and resonating and vibrating are phenomena of instability. The voice may be a metaphor or a model--except where, in Tran(slate), it is an actual source of acoustic data--but what is it a model of? We know, pace Goethe, it is no longer conversation. But it need not even be speech, or, in the last analysis, anything so anatomically specific as the vocal. Instead, it can be something more fundamental, more general, and, for Lara, more musical: an endless fount of vitality, a model of being.