For its farewell season after 35 years, the Nomos Quartet from Hanover created a concert series in 2019 around the works by Ludwig van Beethoven, who had set standards in the field of string quartets. For this event, the ensemble commissioned a new work from Iris ter Schiphorst, in which the composer at first studied Beethoven's first contribution to the genre. However, her distance from the reference piece became greater than initially planned, and the question that moved centre-stage was: 'How does Beethoven's music resonate in me at all? Is it musical gestures, themes or moods?' The tonal result of this composing self-exploration is - rich in contrast, often noise-like and pushing the dynamic range to its limits - the personal reformulation of Beethovian 'pathos formulas', i. e. signs of passionate experience embodied in the universal cultural heritage.