###### photo by Sophie Anne-Herin
The Quartetto Maurice, active since 2002, has deepened its study of the contemporary music repertoire with the greatest performers and the leading composers of the international scene, and is also engaged in the promotion of new music through commissions to Italian and foreign composers, maintaining a 360-degree curiosity and openness toward today's jagged compositional landscape. It works actively in an "expanded" formation with electronics, exploring the possibilities of chamber music to explore new forms.
After having had the chance to meet with half of the group on the occasion of the tenth edition of Musica in Prossimità, the contemporary and experimental music festival of which the Quartet is artistic director in Pinerolo, we seized the opportunity for a conversation about their activity, also given the recent release on Holidays Records of "Fragmente – Stille, an Diotima," the string quartet composed by Luigi Nono in 1980.
We recently had the chance to have an introductory chat about the 2024 edition of Musica in Prossimità, the festival you created and organize. How did your collaboration with the vocal quartet SoloVoices go?
Working together with another ensemble that has its own internal dynamics and established habits is never easy or obvious, but precisely for that reason it was very formative. The commissioned pieces gave us the chance to get to know each other and to work on various aspects of interplay such as pulse, dynamics, attacks and endings, and on how to find a common approach toward the audience.
In Nodo Infinito by Juste Janulyte the aim was to find a single sound and a shared breath. Through mutual listening we tried to find and re-find a meeting point in the construction of the long crescendos and long diminuendos, which the composer calls waves, through a harmonic and dynamic play that might appear simple but in fact demands enormous care and then turns out to be extremely effective.
In "Mirror Game" by Lang, the organization of the work was instead different, since the piece consists of open sections in which the ensemble has to coordinate through one of the performers who, in turn, acts as the reference for the unfolding of events. These moments alternate with scenes that are instead synchronous. The whole piece unfolds without interruption, so an alternation of "guides" had to be built for the various scenes; on top of that, we had to develop a different approach to the acoustic result, since the string quartet and the vocal quartet are placed almost facing each other, as in front of a mirror. We rehearsed a great deal to balance the sound of the strings with that of the voices in a hall that is apparently very generous and of good acoustic quality but difficult in terms of balance, especially between high and low frequencies. This made us aware that in future concerts we will have to study the response of the hall each time, something that with the quartet is by now a consolidated and quick practice, but that with a new group using an instrument different from ours will be a longer and more complicated procedure.
Your latest LP came out in October, for which you recorded Luigi Nono's Fragmente – Stille, An Diotima: what drove you to this recording effort and how did it develop? What is your relationship with Nono?
One of the aims of the Quartetto Maurice has always been the study of the great string quartet repertoire of the second half of the twentieth century. Some authors have left an indelible mark on the contemporary landscape, contributing to genuine leaps forward in the development of compositional language. Luigi Nono was certainly one of these figures, as well as an author of great philosophical breadth and a figure of incessant political commitment throughout his career.
The depth of his compositions caught our attention a long time ago, but only in 2020, helped by the halt imposed by the pandemic, did we decide to tackle the monumental "Fragmente-stille, an Diotima." 45 consecutive minutes of sounds, silences, imagination, stasis, whispers, vortices... after a year of study and a few live performances, we decided to work also on a recording project for this piece, produced by the label Holidays Records and released on the occasion of the concert for the TOlistenTO festival. We are not a quartet that churns out records continuously, so for us the choice to record this piece was deeply felt. The temporal distance from the writing of the work was the trigger for a dialogue between digital and analog, on various artistic levels (the first pressing is on vinyl; inside the record there is a contribution by the photographer Sophie Anne Herin with two printing styles; the critical text is by the musicologist Francesca Scigliuzzo in dialogue with a text by Nono himself).
Looking at your repertoire, one finds young composers as much as great authors of the twentieth century. I imagine these two cases lead to a different context and way of working; how does it work for you?
Contrary to what one might think, our approach is the same, whether for younger or new scores or for the more "historical" repertoire: continuous in-depth study of the score and sonic research within the infinite interpretive potential offered by the string quartet formation. The only very great difference is whether or not we have the chance to interact with the composer.
How does the work of a string quartet like yours function? I am referring less to fundraising and professional relationships than to the musical work of rehearsals, of interpreting the score, of dialogue with composers.
The work of a chamber music group, or if you like in general the work of a performer of classical and contemporary classical music, always starts from the study and in-depth analysis of the score. The text (when there is one) is for us an equally important resource, on which we do a great deal of research. To do this, a study that is, if you like, also musicological is necessary: on the author, on the historical and musical context in which he or she moved, and a personal acquaintance with the composer in the case of contemporary works in the strict sense of the term. The dialogue with the composer is often continuous, made of meetings, stories and sharing and mutual acquaintance. This lays the foundations for imagining an interpretation that then has to do instead with our taste, with the sound we imagine, our self and our physicality. The performer is the filter between the score and the listener. After all, we are the first listeners of ourselves, and we try to make our interpretation adhere as much as possible to how and what we are.
We care a lot that the creative process a performer goes through be understood and recognized, because it often seems ambiguous, unclear, precisely because it deals with everything that is perhaps hard to explain in words.
It seems that the composer-ensemble of performers apparatus is one of the last invisible barriers between the great fluid mass of contemporary sound arts and what I would venture to call "New Music" and its derivatives, not so much at the aesthetic level as in terms of cultural environment and contexts of listening and learning. Will this barrier dissolve? And what is the role of crossover festivals like Musica in Prossimità in this operation?
We do not know whether this barrier will come down, but we know that this is precisely the goal of Musica in Prossimità. This does not mean that the works and approaches to musical matter are totally different depending on where they originate, nor do we think the two worlds should denature themselves, but what we hope for with Musica in Prossimità is that the two worlds come closer and learn from each other, and that prejudices and preconceptions about the world of contemporary music in the broader sense be torn down. To create the festival's content we spend a lot of time listening to many different artists and a lot of different music; placing oneself in listening is perhaps the most fitting term to describe an attitude, both inner and practical, within the various musical contexts in which we can move both as performers and as organizers.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →