EKSTASIS – Polyphõnos discordiae

For convenience, the quartet is tracked on five movements on this recording but the score is written as a single movement and should be performed and heard as such. The whole is spiked by a feeling of awry tuning derived from the instruction to tune two of each instrument’s strings down by one eighth of a tone, while the remaining two strings remain truly tuned. Traditional, full-contact bowing of the strings is used sparingly in the score. Bowing is often used to conjure up overtones rather than play the fundamental note.

In isolation, the constituent parts of Christensen’s quartet can seem like the very essence of ‘musique concrète’ – music as an object, a sound in space. And yet, the 45-minute span of EKSTASIS undoubtedly charts some sort of journey. The music shifts perspective in paragraphs, examining gestural material close up and at distance. The tight discourse between the four instruments can appear to be in a state of constant evolutionary development towards new breakthroughs or horizons – always on the hunt for an accord that will prove a passport to the next viable soundscape.

That process is carried by a rhythmic propulsion that can be light and gentle or stern and motoric. In both states, it is frequently eddied by ‘tuplet’ sequences – sudden lurches (as well as deep dives) into quintuplets, sextuplets or septuplets. These distortions of the time signature give the impression of the music momentarily gusting into a higher velocity or being weighted into a lower one – its metre compressed and then expanded – thus altering our perception of rhythmic progress and of time itself. Repetition, likewise, gives the impression of gently shifting the meaning or message of what we are hearing.

The quartet’s apparently continuous but gradual process of rhythmic and material divergence and convergence takes it into differing terrains, from light swaying dances and introspective, glacial chords to what the composer describes as ‘rattling noisy sections’ comprised of brutal, blade-like gestures from bowed strings. From the very start of the piece, we might have had the sense of a melody existing in low hinterlands courtesy of viola and cello (an echo of Towards Nothingness) and within that we might discern the falling interval of a ‘compressed’ fifth – a Christensen hallmark, where one eighth of a note is missing. All the material is bound together as if it had been shattered and resolutely reassembled – melodies, if we even perceive them as such, are hocketed around the ensemble as if no single instrument can speak without the assistance of the others.

Through it all, the four players of the quartet are intensely co-dependent while somehow retaining autonomy. When you stand back from all the fastidious detail – aurally speaking – a sense of the broader musical tapestry emerges. It is this clear picture from a mass of detail, at once meditative and ferocious, which defines the new sound dimension Christensen has found in the string quartet and draws us so powerfully into.
 

Andrew Mellor is author of The Northern Silence – Journeys in Nordic Music and Culture (Yale University Press)