for 2 Violins, Viola and Violoncello. Par SCHUMANN ROBERT. 'The next I'll do is 3 violin quartets' wrote Schumann to Clara Wieck in 1838, stating his reasons in a letter dated 17 March 1838: 'The thought of the quartets gives me pleasure. The piano is getting too narrow for me. In composing now I often hear a lot of things that I can barely suggest. For instance, it is remarkable how I invent almost everything canonically and never discover the imitating voices until afterward, very often in inversions, inverted rhythms.' The new urtext edition is based on the text of the Schumann Complete Edition./ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par HUREL PHILIPPE. Dans En filigrane, I'électronique, fixée, tient à donner l'illusion du temps réel. La musique étant rapide et rythmique, la texture se faisant dense, il serait difficile d'aller «pêcher» ici et là des petites interventions de chacun des quatre musiciens du Quatuor Tana et de les traiter en temps réel. La partie électronique est donc à la fois un prolongement instrumental mais aussi une forme organisée sur la base du micro-montage, les sons produits en studio étant volontairement courts et venant simplement iriser, colorer, spatialiser des événements qui donnent la clé de l'articulation formelle de la pièce. Au contraire, en arrière-plan, en filigrane donc, une longue séquence - les premières mesures instrumentales de la pièce enregistrées préalablement - se fait entendre à trois reprises. Cet arrière-plan est audible ou non, couvert volontairement par le quatuor ou apparaissant seul, tel une matrice qui a fait naître le matériau de la pièce. La musique est nerveuse, rythmique, et oscille entre I'idée de processus «objectif» identifiable et variation «subjective». Hauteurs et modes de jeux y ont la même place mais prennent tour à tour le dessus, en fonction de la dramaturgie de l'oeuvre. La partition est dédiée à mon père, disparu durant la composition de la pièce. Elle s'inscrit dans une série d'oeuvres récentes marquées par les deuils - So nah so fern, D'autre part, Ouelques traces dans l'air, Ritual trio - qui traitent de la disparition, de la résurgence et de la trace. Philippe Hurel / Date parution : 2024-02-17/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Chaconne. Par LERDAHL FRED. Chaconne (2016), for string quartet, was commissioned by the Daedalus Quartet to celebrate its 15th anniversary. The commission was supported by New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, and Aaron Copland Fund for Music. My music has a substantial history with Daedalus. I composed the Third String Quartet (2008) for them, and subsequently they performed my three string quartets on several occasions and recorded them brilliantly on Bridge Records (Bridge 9352: Music of Fred Lerdahl, vol. 3). Chaconne is in one movement lasting 19 minutes. It is effectively my fourth string quartet. Quartets 1-3 form a unified cycle lasting 70 minutes. When I finished the cycle, I thought I would never write again for the medium; yet I could not resist the opportunity of working again with Daedalus. The issue was how to compose another string quartet unrelated to the earlier cycle. The solution came from my solo cello piece There and Back Again (2010), which was based on a four-bar variation pattern from a 17th-century chaconne. Unlike the asymmetrical phrases and expanding variations of much of my music, the chaconne form requires symmetrical phrases and strictly periodic variations. I wished to work again with these symmetries but on a larger scale. Chaconne also differs in character and expression from the three-quartet cycle. The cycle is inward and intense, a kind of psychological excavation. Chaconne is, for the most part, transparent and playful. Many of its textures emerge from little canons, not completely unlike the rounds that children sing. Any composer who writes in chaconne form (one thinks above all of the last movement of Bach’s D minor violin partita and the finale of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony) is confronted with the challenge of how to create a larger form out of a constantly repeating pattern. My Chaconne grows from paired antecedent-consequent phrases, each variation lasting eight bars. The 50 variations group into three large rotations, forming three arcs of tension and relaxation, with subtle parallel connections across the rotations. Notwithstanding my attraction to chaconne form, I purposefully disguised its symmetries and periodicities in order to build an overall dramatic shape. Fred Lerdahl/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Par ADAMS JOHN LUTHER. John Luther Adams' Everything That Rises for String Quartet. John Luther Adams' Everything That Rises for String Quartet. Composers note: I never imagined I would write a string quartet. Then I heard the JACK Quartet, and I understood how Imight be able to make the medium my own. The result was The Wind in High Places - a twenty-minute work composed entirely on natural harmonics and open strings. Over the next few years, twomore quartets followed. The second quartet, untouched, is a further exploration of the aeolian sound world of the first. Then, in Canticles of the Sky, the musicians finally touch the fingerboards of theirinstruments. And now comes Everything That Rises . This fourth quartet is more expansive, both in time and in space. It grows out of Sila: The Breath of the World - aperformance-length choral/orchestral work composed on a rising series of sixteen harmonic clouds. Everything That Rises traverses this same territory, but in a much more melodic way. Each musician isa soloist, playing throughout. They surround the audience. Time floats. Over the course of an hour, the lines spin out - always rising - in acoustically perfect intervals that grow progressively smaller as they spiralupward... until the music dissolves into the soft noise of the bows, sighing. Duration: 60 minutes/ Répertoire / Quatuor à Cordes

Born in South Africa, but now an Irish citizen, Kevin Volans' musical idiom has been shaped by an unusually diverse range of experiences, including studies with Stockhausen in Cologne, field trips to South Africa to study traditional music, his own involvement with the New Simplicity movement, his collection of contemporary art and African textiles, friendships with composers like Morton Feldman and Gerald Barry, as well as a love of virtuoso piano music which he performs, broadcasts and records. While having an easily recognised, unique voice, Volans' music resists compartmentalisation. He is as comfortable working in conventional genres as embarking on innovative collaborations with artists of other disciplines.String Quartet #1 (White Man Sleeps) was written for the Kronos Quartet and was first performed by them in July 1986, London.The title 'White Man Sleeps' comes from a moment in nyanga Panpipe music where the performers leave off playing their loud pipes for a few cycles and dance only to the sound of their ankle rattles, to let the white landowner sleep - for a minute or two.'In composing this piece I drew from the following sources: the first movement owes something to the style of Basotho concertina music - the second and fourth movements are drawn from traditional Nyungwe music played by Makina Chirenje and his Nyanga panpipe group at Nsava, Tete, Mozambique, recorded and transcribed by Andrew Tracey (to be found in an article entitled 'The nyanga Panpipe dance' in African Music, Vol.5, #1 (1971) - the third movement derives from the San bow music (recorded by Tony Traill of the University of Witwatersrand) and from Basotho lesiba music, transcribed by myself - in the fifth movement I added my own invented folklore. My approach to the original music was anything but purist - it is played in Western tuning, filtered, slowed down by a few 'time-octaves?, cast into non-African metres (like the 13-beat pattern of the first dance) and redistributed between the players in several ways. I also used interlocking techniques where they were absent in the original models and vice versa' - Kevin VolansDuration 24 minutes. Parts available: CH61205. / Quatuor A Cordes (Conducteur)