Introduction P 5 Heartstrings P 6 Cordes sensibles P 13 Sung Text . Texte chanté P 20 Index P 27 2 Hace siglos te hicieron niños que vieron pájaros por pura devoción al viento. You were made centuries ago by children who saw birds purely devoted to the wind. Des enfants te firent il y a des siècles, à l’image d’oiseaux, par pure dévotion pour le vent. Rocío González Photo : Tony Hutchings. Jake Arditti, Hilda Paredes, Irvine Hilda Paredes, Arditti, Arditti Jake Menu This cd marks a significant date for all Ce cd marque une date importante pour tous participants: the Arditti String Quartet ses participants : le quatuor à cordes Arditti celebrates its 40th anniversary in March 2014 célèbre son 40e anniversaire au mois de mars and it is an honor for me to be able to share 2014 et c’est un honneur pour moi de pouvoir this celebration with several of the works I prendre part à cette célébration avec plusieurs have written for them in the past twenty years. des œuvres que j’ai écrites pour eux au cours Yes, I have shared this journey for half of the des vingt dernières années. Oui, j’ai partagé Quartet’s life, with my husband Irvine Arditti ce voyage pendant la moitié de l’existence du and my stepson and countertenor in his own quatuor, avec mon mari Irvine Arditti et mon right Jake Arditti, for whom all pieces in this beau-fils, le contreténor Jake Arditti, pour qui cd were written for. toutes les pièces de ce cd ont été écrites. The past twenty years have been a time of Ces vingt dernières années ont été un temps shared inspiration and experiences, that have d’inspiration et d’expériences partagés qui ont enriched our lives tremendously and music considérablement enrichi nos vies respectives has constantly raised our awareness for what et la musique a constamment renforcé la is important to us as human beings. conscience que nous avons de ce qui est important pour nous en tant qu’êtres humains. It is a great pleasure to be able to share with C’est un grand plaisir de pouvoir partager avec our listeners a part of our lives, hoping that nos auditeurs une partie de nos vies, et nous our music making will enrich your lives as espérons que notre musique enrichira vos vies much as it has done ours. autant qu’elle a enrichi les nôtres. Hilda Paredes 5 English Menu composer whose life is between worlds – between Heartstrings Mexico, her native country, to which she returns to So busy and yet so still, so free in its gestures and teach, and whose poets provided the words not yet so centred, Hilda Paredes’s music for strings only for Papalote but also for the larger Canciones achieves a rare, airy balance. The image could be lunáticas, and England, where she has lived much that of a kite, the subject of one of her songs, heard of her adult life, and where she has family ties, her here in two versions. The kite – a string instrument husband Irvine Arditti and stepson Jake Arditti itself, one might say – is tethered, but nevertheless being represented on this record – finds her home, tugs and swoops. So does this music. Here and at least where these works are concerned, in the there the tethering is openly disclosed: G–D–A–E, character and tuning of her instruments. or, for the viola and cello, C–G–D–A, the simple Papalote in its original version, for voice and violin, is facts of the instruments’ tuning. These facts seem the oldest piece here, dating from 2000; the others to underlie everything, be responsible for everything came in quick succession – though interspersed – and not just the strings’ music. When the counter- with other works by this busy composer – some years tenor enters in the kite song, in either version, later, the memorial to Thomas Kakuska, viola player he revolves on the violin’s uppermost fifth, A–E, of the Alban Berg Quartet, in 2006, the expanded delicately supported by the violin in the version with Papalote the next year, Cuerdas del destino in 2007-8 that instrument, or by the cello and second violin and Canciones lunáticas in 2008-9. in the version with quartet. Of course, he and his companion or companions have a long way to In Papalote the vocal melody is at once ingenious go, even in the course of this relatively short song, and natural – and relatively simple because Paredes but the basic facts are in place, and they stay firm was writing here for her stepson as a boy treble. however much the music will draw against them. But it is also fascinatingly ambiguous, not least in Papalote comes back to the same fifth from time to how that opening A–E, which embeds the voice in time, eventually loops back to its beginning, and re- the instrumental music, also springs open a vista echoes the pizzicato A as it ends, even though the back to folk song, rather as Rocio González (one music has by then taken off into the far high treble, of the most admired Mexican poets of Paredes’s where it disappears, going out of earshot. generation) does in her poem. By belonging with the violin, in the first version of the song, the voice More seems to be at stake here than fidelity to the finds this other connection. At the same time, the instruments. An anchorage is sought and secured, piece perhaps expresses the intimate kinship precisely in those instruments, for whatever between its intended performers (could the choice exercises of fantasy the composer might want of a poem beginning with those two syllables have to pursue. This is, in essence, her tradition: the been accidental?), the violin doubling every one physical nature of the means for which she writes. A of the voice’s notes, in unisons that certainly add 6 to the piece’s luminosity, while finding its own way contrasting motivic ideas. But I also wanted to from each to the next. The voice is an abstract of the express his profoundly melancholic soul, which I try violin, the violin a development of the voice. Theme to portray harmonically, mostly explored in the last and variation proceed hand in hand. section of the piece.’ Sections generally end with the Then there is the word-painting, which might even be bow bouncing on a string followed by a pause, as if beginning before the voice enters, for the opening waiting for a response that will never come. gesture settles on a high sustained E flat that could Cuerdas del destino is Paredes’s second string represent the sailing kite, or the sky in which it sails, quartet, following Uy u T’an (‘Listen how they talk’, but could equally be the net, or the kite now viewed 1998). Where in that earlier work she mobilized the as the connected contrary of the net, for the voice, instruments as characters in a play, this time they following a chromatic fall that the violin (in either are conjoined, strung together, moving through version) had already undergone, names the E flat phases that are quite different from one another an octave down with that word. As a musical image and yet linked, each emerging from the last, until the floating E flat – which returns, and, an octave the end, as if indeed the music were pulled, pulling higher, carries the music away – does not ask to be itself, through its attachment to ‘strings of destiny’. identified, of course. At the start it is one element The introduction – which again immediately skids to in the quick summoning of a strange, nocturnal a high level, but even higher, a fifth above the other atmosphere, under the moon. works’ E flat – is made mostly of tremolandos, like The atmosphere is very different, but some of the beams of light in motion, and rushing pizzicatos, same features can be found in In memoriam Thomas with occasional halts on ‘white-note’ chords bowed Kakuska, including pizzicato open strings beneath col legno. From these grows the first main section, a high line and, as the first bowed note, even the where each instrument’s quarter-tone line seems to identical E flat, which is soon extended into a motif be searching in the dark for some elemental melody that is recalled and lost though the course of the that has been lost. Bouncing gestures, again, carry piece: D – E flat – G flat – E (up a semitone, up a the piece towards its next state, and persist for a minor third, down a whole tone). One difference from long while beneath harmonics scanning the upper Papalote is that the violin now knows about quarter- air. These give way to noise effects, and then to tones and a whole range of playing techniques – an exchange of pizzicatos and col legno strikes rapid runs, angular rhythms, slow-moving melodies in which the instruments move into and out from bound to a drone, double-stopped harmonics – metrical conformity on their way to solid pulsation. which it surveys in a sequence of verses, as it were. High harmonics return, followed by some massive ‘When I started working on the piece’, Paredes crescendos, out from which explodes the finale, has recalled, ‘I wanted to portray Tommy’s cheerful whose ultimate turn is back to an earlier stage of spirit and I did this by means of working on short the work. 7 Paredes found a parallel for much of the imagery of this quartet in the writing of another Mexican poet, one a little older than her, Pedro Serrano, and one telling again of the moon, if in a more sombre spirit.