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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSHSBwUqP-Y

String Quartet No. 4 (1964) Composer: Giacinto Scelsi (1905 - 1988)

Performers: Arditti String Quartet: Irvine Arditti, violin; David Alberman, violin; Levine
Andrade, viola; Rohan de Saram, cello.
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Barely a year separates the Third Quartet from the Fourth, and yet the latter, composed in
1964, demonstrates a huge step forward. The score's material aspect alone reveals it: this
single movement nine minutes long needs forty-four printed pages, whereas the Second
Quartet's five movements only demand twenty-eight. Indeed, the endlessly increasing
subtleness of the sounds' differentiation leads the composer to treat (and hence to notate) each
string separately, on its own stave. The third part of the great Trilogy for Cello, Ygghur
(1965), Xnoybis for Violin (1964) or Elegia per Ty for Viola and Cello (1966) are other
examples of this creative phase, of which, however, the Fourth Quartet remains the most
extraordinary witness: not at all a quartet in fact, but an "orchestral" composition for sixteen
strings (sometimes notated on thirteen or fourteen staves) where each string is treated as an
instrument with its own colour. Therefore, it is not surprising that Scelsi produced in 1967 a
slightly amplified variant for eleven stringed instruments, Natura Renovatur, which, no
doubt, slightly eases the performers' task, but which does not really surpass the quartet
version in brilliance or richness of tone. For indeed, it seems as if we were listening to a
whole orchestra!

The great form unfolds like a fan, the sounds broadening up until the greatest possible vertical
total before tightening up again. The Golden Section is found at the first fortissimo (bar 143),
sustained from then on until just before the end. Here too, low notes are extremely rare, and
the cello's fourth string is only heard once, at bars 107 to 109 (low E). Here too, the music in
some places recalls a kind of tonality (c-sharp minor from bar 40, d-minor at bar 140's
(Golden Section) great climax, and rather f-minor towards the end). The work begins "on C"
and then follows a great, slowly ascending curve, reaching A at bar 139, without managing to
maintain it for more than an instant. At bar 158, we are back to F. A second rise again reaches
A, first in an unsteady state (219), and quite at the end, in a steady one at last, fading away
into silence.

Scelsi was particularly proud of his Fourth Quartet, and it is indeed a crowning achievement
in his work, as well as in all quartet literature. In the beginning of the seventies, Scelsi's music
reaches an ultimate state of spirituality, with extremely concise pages in which any outer
gesture has become well nigh imperceptible. Now everything happens in materially the most
restricted space, the range being sometimes reduced to a mere interval of a second, but that
which emerges is of extraordinarily concentrated energy. These late works, in fact, witness
the ultimate goal of a creative itinerary pursued without the slightest concession: it is only in a
state of apparent immobility that the energy within the sound rises through implosion to
incandescence! Such "borderline" music, the old master's most radical advance into the next
century, demands a new way of listening, for which an accomplished training in
"contemporary music" is utterly useless, but which lies open to the well-disposed and open-
minded amateur, also receptive in mind and spirit. This is why the musical pundits fear and
hate Scelsi and his music: has he, have they, not broken a secular curse?"

Harry Halbreich