If you live in a box and you take a bath, when you drop your head into the water, you can hear your neighbors. Their stunning noises, their horrible music, their clumsy steps, the stupid things they are doing. They talk in any language but yours. They scream, they laugh, they fuck, they argue, they break things, they cry, they get older. You hate them because they are living with you in that bath. Sometimes, if you live in a box and you take a bath, when you drop your head into the water you can also hear your breath, your heart, your blood, your bowels.

If you lived into the sea and you dropped your head into the water you would hear silence and the noise of the chains of some distant ship. You can’t hear yourself, your breath, your heart, your blood, your bowels. You would feel fresh water with no waste of your body floating around. And, of course, you wouldn ́t hear the stupid things that your neighbors do. Those things that you hate so much because you know are the same stupid things you always do.

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Living in a Box (2023) for flute, clarinet, saxophone, violin, cello, and piano was premiere by the Barcelona Modern Ensemble in the Sala Cambra of the Conservatori Superior Liceu at the Festival de Música Contemporània i Nova Creació on June 22nd of 2023 in Barcelona, Spain.

This work was composed in the framework of the International Course of Composition Barcelona Modern 9º edition and is especially composed for the Barcelona Modern Ensemble.

Living in a Box is the third and last part of what I denominated "Set of Houses" and it is inspired in the apartment I lived in the United States: 1133 Ashland Road, apartment 911, MO.

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