for two violins, viola and violoncello (2020)
11 minutes
Description
This work presents textures that are primarily defined harmonically, but then coarsened and differentiated with various instrument-specific techniques of invigoration, e.g., arpeggios, tremolos, glissandi. The piece also demonstrates that the composer has developed for himself a personal grammar, a harmonic language on the basis of different scales and derived chords. From it he derives everything from the individual gesture to entire blocks of sound, which he arranges and repositions in the musical space, much as a painter might vary his coloured surfaces through brush width and paint saturation. This procedure results in formal clarity and what for Samy Moussa is the foundation of aesthetic pleasure: recognizability. He is as disinterested in an aesthetic of excess through enforced information density as he is in expressly experimental approaches. He instead reduces his compositional ideas time and again during the creative process, until they have found their necessary and appropriate form.
Recording
Dedication
Pascal Dusapin
First performance
July 14, 2012
Edenkoben, Germany
Herrenhaus Edenkoben
Arditti String Quartet
Pairing suggestions
Maurice Ravel: String quartet
Claude Debussy: String quartet
Leoš Janáček: String quartets
Philip Glass: String quartets
Benjamin Britten: String quartets
Access
Available for hire.
Contact Durand-Salabert-Eschig