One of the strongest memories of my musical development occurred during my early childhood. My father, also a musician, and I were walking through our orange grove outside Sparta. As a sudden gust of wind blew, we heard a fascinating faint sound, produced by the vibration of a taut string used to tie two branches from different trees together. Several years later, the distant memory of that undulating microtonal melody became the basis for my saxophone quartet “Ta Entos”, “Those Inside” in Greek. Throughout the piece’s development, the melody is subjected to a series of perturbations that create a dynamic interchange of expanding and contracting transformations, until the final, fragile point of rest. The title of the piece reflects its literally introspective character: every new gesture or idea is nestled in the generative melodic line and develops in concentric circles that continuously reveal new facets and establish new associations within it. “Ta Entos” was commissioned and premiered by the PRISM saxophone quartet in New York. - Stratis Minakakis