Скачать или смотреть Marco Stroppa - Spirali (1987-88)

Marco Stroppa (*1959)
Spirali (1987-88) per quartetto d'archi proiettato nello spazio
["Spirals", for string quartet projected into space]

Arditti String Quartet
Sound projection: Marco Stroppa
Musical realisation: Serge Lemouton


"Try and imagine a string quartet ina very small room, with the instruments positioned in the four corners: there is no more room for the audience. Imagine also, however, that the audience can shrink itself to become a small dot exactly in the middle of the quartet, and that the four instrumentalists play various musical objects in succession: even if the musicians stay seated, one's impression will be that these objects are moving. Imagine, finally, that the materials the walls are made of can change, becoming harder, more opaque and absorbent, and that each corner, with its respective player, can move away from and back towards the audience. In this way, a circular motion turns into a spiral. When these changes are integrated with the musical objects, one generates a sound world in which each object moves in a specific variable space, acquiring a dimension of depth.
The acoustic string quartet is projected, in expanded proportions, onto loudspeakers placed around the audience, while the electronics - which has a very virtuosic part played in real time by a fifth interpreter - realizes the movements (away from and towards) of the musical objects. This reated can coagulate in a set of points, or distend itself to form a surface (one perceives a directionality, though it is relatively imprecise), or even transform itself into a diffuse space where everything is everywhere, as hapens at the beginning of the piece. This development is presented in the reverse order, from maximum distance to maximum proximity.
From the formal point of view, "Spirali" consists of numerous spiral-shaped structures founded on the model of a latent chorale, which guides the formal itinerary, even though it is never directly perceived. It is a tribute to the slow movement of Beethoven's Quartet op. 132, a work that I happened to discover when I was a child and that particularly struck me (I do not come from a family of musicians, and my approach was purely instinctive: I had no idea that music could also be studied). Only at the end does the outline of a chorale seem to surface, in the low register of the viola and cello, while the violins, projected into higher-pitched regions, shine in an increasingly remote space." [M.S.]