We are now living in a post-Arditti age of composition. Future generations of musicologists will refer to a school of composers which emerged around the turn of the century with aesthetic and technical values attuned to the Arditti Quartet’s strengths.
I spent Saturday in that new theatre at the Barbican, taking in three concerts given by the quartet to commemorate their 40th anniversary. The fifteen pieces played ranged from the first piece written for them (Jonathan Harvey’s first string quartet) to three world premieres, with an emphasis on music from the past 20 years. Each concert ended with one of the signature pieces from their repertoire: Helmut Lachenmann’s Grido, Ligeti’s Second Quartet and Xenakis’ Tetras.
It’s almost facetious to say that these last pieces stood out way above much of the rest of the programme, but that’s what pretty much everyone felt, myself included. I’m more interested in why we felt that way.
The Arditti Quartet has brought exceptional virtuosity to chamber music and commissioned hundreds of works. They’ve opened up seemingly limitless possibilities, giving composers the impression that anything is possible. The effect has been similar in many respects to the recent explosion in the capability and accessibility of computerised sound processing. The end result is kind of the same, too: a large, glittering body of work somewhat lacking in substance, and strangely homogeneous in the way each new composer is eager to try out as many of the same set of cool new tricks as possible. The assimilation of spectralism into intonation, microtones as colouration, rapid passages of leaps and glissandi, scratch tones, were all combined into a general ethos of respectable expressionism and assigned various weightings in the pieces by Hector Parra, Georg Friedrich Haas, Hilda Paredes, Pascal Dusapin and Toshio Hosokawa. Similar manifestations of this style could be heard at Huddersfield last year in quartets by composers ranging from Alberto Posadas to John Zorn.
The aspects that stood out in the old-ish classics on the programme were not simply quality, but contrast. The new work by Hilda Paredes would have sounded more striking had it not been bookended by Parra and Haas. The Harrison Birtwistle premiere was an occasional piece but distinctive in its refusal to add gestural ornament to its substance. The remaining premiere, James Clarke’s Third Quartet, was only five minutes long but a tour de force of concision, putting technique at the service of a sculptural intensity lacking in so many of the other works. The mixing of contrast and flow echoed the presence of the Ligeti movements heard in the same concert. The exploitation of dynamics as musical material was one of the more obvious examples of techniques used for the sake of music, not just musicianship.
I was going to end this post by quoting an anecdote involving Arditti and Alvin Lucier, but I just googled for it and holy poo get a load of this:
The string quartet was the university computer-music-studio of the 1940s and 1950s… It is a characteristic of the string quartet to emphasize moving the bow back and forth. The more the better.
Insert: Mr. Arditti, of string quartet fame, complained to Alvin Lucier, in the presence of a large number of people, that he didn’t like to play Alvin’s String Quartet, because there was very little bow movement, which lack of bow movement made his arm tired. To which Alvin replied, “Why don’t you play it with the other arm?”
This is from a lecture by the late Robert Ashley, who of course had this all sussed out long ago. Go read that whole blog post.
[…] For the record, Buckner performed a version of Ashley’s opera Atalanta (Acts of God), consisting of the “Odalisque” aria from Act I, “Mystery of the River” from Act II, and the Anecdote “The Producer Speaks” from Act III. The first act was accompanied by piano, electric piano and synthesized organ, the third act by piano alone. “Mystery of the River” was a new electronic realisation, made only last year as it had never been performed before then. After the interval, Buckner sang Tract, a wordless melody with electronic accompaniment, and World War III Just the Highlights, for voice and chorus. Tract began as a setting of a Wallace Stevens poem for voice and string quartet until Ashley realised he didn’t want to bend other people’s texts to fit music and as for string quartets, well. […]