To write music from an emotional standpoint requires you to transfer inexplicable subtleties to the stave. If the notes are unable to transmit that emotion to whoever must interpret it, the work loses its meaning.

Having the chance to collaborate with a quartet that is distinguished, among its many other virtues, by its control of pianissimos or tempo to the ultimate extreme, enabled me to develop the musical ideas that came into my mind, and imagine that it was possible to perform them without having to explain.

When writing a musical work, I always think about its performance. Not just the musical nuances concern me, but also how an audience will hear them. A Mortuis Resurgere (The Resurrection of Christ) was written to be performed in churches. That does not mean that it cannot be played in an auditorium, but it does mean that the work must respect the specific acoustic characteristics found in religious buildings. Given that the reverberation time in such places may vary between 2 and 7 seconds, its impact on listening to a musical work becomes obvious.

Take the case of a score written in 4/4 at a tempo marked crotchet=60. This means that each part of the bar will last one second. In other words, each bar lasts four seconds. Now imagine that it is to be played in a church with a reverberation time of six seconds. A crotchet played during the first second will continue to be heard until the seventh, and the second until the eighth. Thus, in musical terms, if the music at the seventh and eighth seconds is not harmonically consistent with what was played in second 1 or second 2, this will affect the musical development uncontrollably, not just in terms of rhythm but also of harmony and, obviously, melody.

Unfortunately, I am unable to imagine the music I hear in my head and then put on paper with precise reverberation control. That forced me, during the process of writing the work, to continuously revise the musical ideas using libraries of samples to which I applied reverberation enabling me to apply the effect of the reverberation of a church or a cathedral at a given virtual point in the space. Thus I was able to understand how an audience in that space would hear it. However, existing digital sample libraries emulate musical instruments only somewhat crudely, so I had no choice but to try to imagine the voice part, although clearly I could adjust the melody in the same way that I had the music for quartet using the method described. In certain chant styles such as liturgical or ecclesiastic monodic chant, this effect can be more easily controlled, but when all vocal techniques including coloratura come into play, I’m sure you can imagine that this process proved to be anything but simple.

Jorge Grundman's 'A Mortuis Resurgere' performed by the Brodsky Quartet is released this week. Buy from Amazon / iTunes

Filmed performance of the 'A Mortuis Resurgere' by Susana Cordón and the Habemus Quartet