The Canadian quartet returns to Albi's GMEA with two concerts on October 8 and 9, one as a quartet, the other with ensemble Dédalus and soprano Peyee Chen. Set between America and Switzerland, the program brings together three of the Quatuor Bozzini's favorite composers: Alvin Lucier, Tom Johnson and Jürg Frey, whose music the quartet has extensively documented on recordings. A journey into sound and the space of sound guaranteed! With this diptych, the Quatuor Bozzini invites us to share a profound and singular listening experience.

Interview with Isabelle Bozzini, cellist, and Clemens Merkel, violinist

How did your two concert programs at the GMEA as part of the riverrun festival come together: the first devoted to American composers Alvin Lucier and Tom Johnson, the second to Swiss composer Jürg Frey?
Isabelle Bozzini We share many musical affinities with Didier Aschour and Dedalus, both in spirit and in our way of working. We've been following each other from afar for fifteen years, and we've been collaborating more directly for four or five. We've invited each other to concerts (them in Montreal, us in Albi). We've also been playingAlvin Lucier 's music since the early 2000s. Clemens and Jürg Frey have known each other since the 1990s. Dedalus and I share these composers, who are also friends.
Clemens Merkel : The concert around Jürg Frey was supposed to take place in 2020, then at the Archipel festival in Geneva in 2021, but that wasn't possible. Fortunately, there was the premiere in Nantes and Huddersfield in 2019, with Dedalus.
Isabelle : Jürg Frey's music only gets better with time. I'm thinking of the piece on the October 9 program with Dedalus, Grounds of Memorybut also his octet with saxophonists. He also composed a fourth quartet for us, which also lasts an hour: nothing but fantastic works!
Clemens : These works are the fruit of a long collaboration. I've known Jürg since 1993, when I was still in Germany and had no experience of quartets. In those years, nobody was talking about Jürg Frey. Outside the small Wandelweiser circle, he was an unknown!

What attracts you most to this music?
Isabelle : The peacefulness. It's music that brings peace and such quiet beauty! That's what we need at a time when everything is so deafening. We're all submerged in noise, information and images... This music takes the time to exist and brings us back to basics. We sensed this right from the start. When we released Jürg Frey's first tracks in the early 2000s, there was a lot of talk about slow food. We said to ourselves: "this music is slow music", in the sense that we take the time to savor each sound. Why does music need a drama every ten bars? It's not necessary... For me, the current Wandelweiser is a very important trend. In our society, we need to refocus, to calm down...
Clemens : The starting point of the Wandelweiser collective is a bit like John Cage's work, firstly because, like all avant-garde experimental music, it's music whose outcome you can't necessarily predict, but also because there's no narrative aspect. Narrative is omnipresent in contemporary music (the idea of drama, emotions, surprise...). That's not to say that there's no emotion in this music, but it's in a different place.
Jürg Frey's music has also evolved considerably. In the 1990s, it was more static in a sense. Today, there's more movement, and you could even say it's almost narrative!
Jürg Frey once commented on the evolution of his music: "In the past, it was as if I were in a place and looking around, whereas today I explore this space by walking".

Does it seek to put the performer and the audience in a state of receptivity?
Clemens : Not exactly, I think it's more the idea of: "don't push the music around! There's no prescription for the audience or the listener: he doesn't give any keys on how to feel his music.
Isabelle : In fact, you just have to let the music exist! It unfolds on its own; you just have to let it be! Hence the importance of silence, especially in the early works, which places her in the heritage of the New York school.
Clemens: When you play, when you listen to the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, in a way, the composer takes you by the hand, a bit like a tourist guide; he takes you from one place to another! In this type of music, on the other hand, you're dropped off in one place, and you have to explore the space yourself.

Is the concrete space of the concert important for playing this music?
Isabelle: It's a delicate music, which we like to play in a space that's both intimate and resonant. What counts is the space we create and that the audience creates with us: it's really a shared listening experience. You could call it a "community"! We try to introduce a different way of listening, we take our time...
Donc riverrun, is the ideal space, because it brings together everything this music needs: reflection, listening, calm, beauty...

Does Jürg Frey think about this idea of "community"?
Isabelle : I think Jürg thinks about it, but he doesn't talk about it directly. This idea is present in the Wandelweiser movement , that goes without saying!
Clemens: The important thing for him and the other Wandelweiser composers is that the musicians and the audience are "in it", and it doesn't matter whether it's five people or three hundred! The most important thing is that the audience is there, and no one is forced to listen.
Jürg will be turning seventy this year, and the way his career has developed over the last ten years surprises even him! For thirty years, he'd been writing exclusively for friends and colleagues, and now all of a sudden he's getting commissions from musicians he doesn't know. It's difficult for him; he needs to know the musicians! Receiving too many commissions is also destabilizing, as he has always composed just what he wanted to write, often without receiving a commission, for the musicians who inspired him. 

Grounds of Memory for soprano and chamber orchestra features a text sung by the formidable Peyee Chen: one of Emily Dickinson's famous envelope poems?
Clemens : Indeed, and this work with the text is very interesting, because precisely in this type of music, what happens to expression, in other words, how do you manage the expressiveness of the text? In a way, it works with the text just as it works with the music. The text doesn't control the music, you don't "follow" the text; it's not an opera. On the other hand, there is this very touching moment in the score, a great singing solo; it's the only moment where you can say that Jürg "reacts" to the text. It's truly beautiful! The strength of the composition also comes from the fact that the poem chosen by Jürg Frey here is one that can be read in thirty seconds, and which he stretches out over an hour of music!

Can we now talk about your concert on October 8, focusing on Alvin Lucier?
Isabelle : We'll be playing all his quartets, except Group Tapper, and combining them with pieces by Tom Johnson, whose quartets we've just recorded. Both are long-time collaborators. When we recorded Alvin's pieces for the last disc, we had a lot of telephone conversations with him, and he had come to Montreal beforehand, so we were able to play in front of him: it's a very fine collaboration!
In Albi, we're playing Navigations, a highly written quartet, and Disappearances, a score-text with a certain freedom for the performers. In both cases, we're navigating between microtonality, beats, tension and resolution.
Clemens : In both pieces, we find the same acoustic phenomenon. Navigations is a small cluster that becomes a unison (we move towards something smaller and smaller...), and the writing is really precise.
In Disappearances, we move from unison to something more open; it's a happier piece in a way, but it's a similar process.
Unamuno, composed in 1994, is a vocal piece arranged for quartet and voice; so we sing and play at the same time.

I suppose you're in a different state when you're playing Alvin Lucier's music than when you're playing Jürg Frey's?
Isabelle: Yes! Playing Alvin Lucier's music requires very intense, sustained concentration; it's fifteen minutes of flow (so when you record it, there's no editing possible), with the added technical challenge of glissandi.
But as this is music that calls for inner listening, we're not that far from our exploration of Jürg Frey's music either.

Have you played any Alvin Lucier pieces with electronics?
Isabelle: Yes, but more solo pieces, and also Small Waves, a sextet with bottles and microphones. Alvin had sent us his bottles by post for this project. We tried to play it in Amsterdam, but the band there didn't have the right bottles or microphones. So it was difficult to get the right micro-intervals. It was very complicated and didn't completely work out, but when he came to Montreal in 2015 it was fantastic! I remember his own performance of Bird and Person Dyning, in which he moves around in space for twenty minutes: it was truly magical, an anthology piece!
Clemens: Indeed, for the Small Waves sextet, he sent us a package with six bottles, and we realized that they really were cheap bottles: one of the bottles was broken and he had glued it back together with a piece of scotch tape! The microphones, too, were a bit rubbish; at any rate, not quality microphones... In the end, it's really the ear that decides what's right or wrong; super-equipment has nothing to do with it!

It's also a way of looking at things from a distance, and probably also a form of humor?
Clemens: Yes, Alvin looked at everything with a wry smile... I think he was like a kid, when he finds something. In the end, all his pieces came from effects or phenomena he found; he made music with them!

He composed until his death?
Isabelle : He'd had a very bad fall in the summer of 2019. Little by little, he was able to get back on his feet. I suppose he kept tinkering, and still thought about music. He was 89... Of course, we would have been delighted to create a new piece by him, but the important thing is to have known him, to have played his music: the four quartets are a sum!
Clemens: Yes, we're very lucky: we already have so much music! Eliane Radigue composed for us, Christian Wolff and Tom Johnson never stop writing music for us... it's so precious!

You'll combine the music of Alvin Lucier with that of Tom Johnson in this program on October 8?
Isabelle: Indeed, we'll be playing two pieces by Tom Johnson.
The program includes Formulas, a 1994 quartet he composed for a Swiss quartet, a rather classical piece. The score is rather "open", with no indication of tempo. So we made our choices on nuances and speeds. It's nine movements "à la Tom Johnson", with cyclical developments, canons, speeds... It's very interesting; it sounds almost "classical" - it's almost Debussy at times - but at the same time, it's Tom Johnson!
We'll also be playing Four-Note Chords in four voices, composed in 2009. It's a piece we added to the disc, because of the brevity of the three quartets. It was he himself who suggested we add this page. It's a fantastic piece, based solely on chords.
Clemens: The thing about Alvin Lucier is that Tom always relies on phenomena that are already there. He often says that you don't have to compose the music, that it's just there! On this page, the chords are there, he's written the minimum: no tempo, no official order, no duration of chords.... it's up to us to find the right balance, to come up with a version that makes sense, to make it sound!
Isabelle: We have to find the mood, a certain flow. We need to have time to hear each chord, but without playing too slowly...

In this kind of open-ended situation, do you always agree with each other?
Clemens: Not at all! That's where the work lies. If you ask the musicians in a quartet for their feelings, there are always at least five answers! But we always end up agreeing, after a lot of hard work...
Isabelle: That's the difficulty. How should a work sound? How do we, the Quatuor Bozzini, sound? And how do we make this music sound? These are the questions you have to ask yourself.
Clemens: Precisely, what's interesting in this type of "naked" piece is to find a balance: to establish a certain flow and at the same time leave enough time to savour each chord! It's a lot of work and time.

Interview by Anne Montaron