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The major work is Diódia, his 3rd String Quartet, written in 1995. Its musical incidents, few and interrelated in an apparently naive way, are drawn from a much larger work, 'The Toll Houses', due for production in New York later this year. It is about waiting, 'the posthumous states of being, ' says the composer, 'where it is decided whether the soul spends a certain period of time in hell and a certain time in heaven.' The quartet is haunted by a simple melody [listen -- track 2, 0:00-0:29] and a folk-like theme [listen -- track 2: 0:48-1:22] and a rhythmic figure, featuring a small drum (bandir) which comes to fruition toward the end of the quartet [listen -- track 7, 3.41-4:36]. There is a brief chordal presentation of the melody in the first of the two movements, Solemn, [listen -- track 3, 0:00-0:38] which becomes the starting point for each of the five four-minute sections of the second movement. The whole piece, 35 minutes of it, is lovingly played and achieves nothing more than its lingering atmosphere. The quartet takes up half the disc. The rest is devoted to songs with quartet accompaniment sung by Patricia Rozario, whose diction in the English texts is not at all clear.

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