On 14 July 2012 the Arditti Quartet will create the Samy Moussa String Quartet.

This work dedicated to Pascal Dusapin in gratitude for his friendship. It presents textures that are primarily defined harmonically, but then coarsened and differentiated with various instrument-specific techniques of invigoration, e.g., arpeggios, tremolos, glissandi. The piece also demonstrates that the composer has developed for himself a personal grammar, a harmonic language on the basis of different scales and derived chords. From it he derives everything from the individual gesture to entire blocks of sound, which he arranges and repositions in the musical space, much as a painter might vary his coloured surfaces through brush width and paint saturation. This procedure results in formal clarity and what for Samy Moussa is the foundation of aesthetic pleasure: recognizability. He is as disinterested in an aesthetic of excess through enforced information density as he is in expressly experimental approaches. He instead reduces his compositional ideas time and again during the creative process, until they have found their necessary and appropriate form.

Samy Moussa - Quatuor à cordes
World premiere: 14 July 2012
Herrenhaus Edenkoben
Quatuor Arditti