Driven by Collaboration
A Conversation with Irvine Arditti 

It was exactly 50 years ago today that the Arditti Quartet gave its first concert. Violinist Irvine Arditti had been tasked with putting together a program celebrating Krzysztof Penderecki at the Royal Academy of Music, which was bestowing an honorary degree on the Polish composer. Arditti gathered a group of fellow young musicians to perform his Second String Quartet, among other works. Pressed to come up with a name in 24 hours, they quickly decided on using that of their founder. Arditti recalls that by the time they began considering a different one, it had already stuck.

Arditti, too, stuck with the quartet, though in the first few years it was “just a hobby. We were only doing between five and ten concerts a year, because I was busy almost all of the time,” the violinist and trailblazing new music advocate said in an interview shortly before embarking on the ensemble’s 50th-anniversary tour. Arditti joined the London Symphony Orchestra in 1976 and was named co-concertmaster just two years later, at the age of 25. He decided to leave the LSO in 1980 to focus on his quartet. There have been several changes in personnel over the decades, Irvine Arditti remaining the one constant. A total of ten other musicians preceded the current formation of violinist Ashot Sarkissjan, violist Ralf Ehlers, and cellist Lucas Fels.

The Arditti Quartet meanwhile became synonymous not only with contemporary experiments in this storied medium but with close collaborations between the ensemble and living composers. Fittingly, Arditti’s own extensive history of the group, recently published, is titled Collaborations: Reflections on 50 Years of Working with Composers. An invaluable resource, it traces the development of the Arditti Quartet through memorable anecdotes of working with the composers who have been important to the ensemble as well as analyses of their repertoire from a musician’s (rather than a musicologist’s) point of view.

György Ligeti, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Pierre Boulez, Roger Reynolds, Wolfgang Rihm, Toshio Hosokawa: this is just a partial list of composers to each of whom an entire chapter of Collaborations is devoted, in turn representing a fraction of the hundreds of new works and commissions championed by the Ardittis and documented by their vast discography of more than 200 recordings. A complete archive of the Arditti Quartet—the only ensemble to date to have received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize for “lifetime achievement” (in 1999)—is housed at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel.

How did your passion for contemporary music guide you in the direction of the string quartet as a medium?
I played second violin in a classical quartet as a student at the Royal Academy but wasn’t terribly interested in it. But I knew a lot about contemporary music. I remember going to Oxford when I was 12 or 13 to hear a concert by the French Radio Orchestra, where I met Messiaen and Xenakis. Even before I joined the Academy at 16, I had gone to Darmstadt and met Stockhausen and Ligeti.
While most people were listening to The Beatles in London in the 1960s, I was listening to contemporary music: the composers of the European avantgarde were the ones who interested me, and I was determined to have a closer relationship with them. The chance came when I was asked to put together a few of Penderecki’s pieces for his visit to receive the Academy’s honorary degree and we were able to work with him. That set the scene for what was to happen. You couldn’t ring Mozart or Haydn up to ask how they wanted mordants played. But you could ask Penderecki what he meant by this here and that there, and this fascinated me.

Yet you soon had a flourishing career as co-concertmaster with the London Symphony—and of course have continued as a soloist sought after by leading composers. What was the impetus to leave the orchestra so you could focus on the Arditti Quartet?
We were getting more and more concerts and it kind of snowballed. We used to reserve whole days for rehearsal and invite the composers to work with us, and people came to see that the composers were happy with the result. I had actually formed the Arditti Quartet to play Ligeti’s Second Quartet in England, because nobody was taking it seriously here. But I had no concept that we would become an international string quartet.

That kind of close collaboration of course became a signature of the ensemble. How much input do you and your colleagues have into the process of actually creating these new pieces?
In the beginning, we collaborated when the pieces were already finished. But some composers would come to try things out. There’s a very interesting story about Helmut Lachenmann’s Third String Quartet Grido [from 2001, which has become perhaps the ensemble’s most frequently performed work of the 21st century]. We were in Germany and arranged a day’s rehearsal with Helmut to go over some sketches he had made. We rehearsed and I thought he was quite happy but then I did not hear from him. When I later rang him up, his wife told me: “He didn’t like anything. He tore it all up.” And he started again, and the piece was incredibly successful. All of which is to say, apart from giving the first performance of a new work, it’s wonderful to be part of its coming into being, part of the mechanics of how a piece is written.

There seems to be an entire spectrum of possible involvement in these collaborations: at one end, composers have very firm ideas of the kinds of sounds they want and are perhaps not even amenable to changes, while at the other you have composers who solicit and incorporate your suggestions. How do you figure out what process works best?
Sometimes I advise them, if they’re not string players, that something could be done in a simpler way than they thought. Some composers want us to do exactly what they tell us to do. I have great admiration for Kurtág, who is one of those. He writes quite simple music, but it’s very expressive music and he wants to control every note of it. I’m very happy to have him control me to obtain what he wants his music to sound like. But I also like working with Toshio Hosokawa, who writes different sorts of technically relatively simple music. And I equally enjoy collaborating with composers like Brian Ferneyhough, whose writing is more complex. We worked a lot with Elliott Carter, and also with Xenakis—they involve different sorts of complexity. I can’t single out any highlights from our 50 years. For me, it’s vive la différence. Please don’t ask me who my favorite composer is!

I won’t—but can I ask what are the criteria for deciding which composers should be your focus, particularly given the enormous variety of artists with whom you have worked?
People often think that I or the Quartet are in total control, but a lot of the time we are asked to play certain things. Somebody might have a Ligeti festival or a Xenakis festival, so we play their music. Or a presenter comes to us and asks if we would be willing to play a piece by a certain composer. Often I take the guidance of people who spend their lives listening to younger composers’ music, even if I don’t always know these artists. We do like to do different things. We did a coaching session with the JACK Quartet when they first started, and several composers have written octets for them and ourselves. We’ve also gotten quite a few composers to write pieces for string quartet and orchestra. Some of these we’re playing this year as part of our 50th birthday celebration.

Looking back over that half century and the fact that there have been quite a few changes in personnel, how have you been able to preserve the Arditti Quartet’s sense of identity through all these years?
A lot of players left for personal reasons—wanting to be in relationships and not being able to, since we travel almost all of the time. But integrating a new player has never been really difficult. It’s nice to have new ideas, someone different playing things in a slightly different way. The tradition of conveying what the composer had in mind has been carried down collectively by all the players who were there. Now I’m the only person who goes back to the beginning, of course. But my colleagues know because they’ve heard me say so many times what Ligeti wanted, what Xenakis wanted. That has become the tradition of the way that we play.

How would you characterize changing trends in the world of the string quartet over the past half century? Recently, for example, we’ve seen a call for increased representation of the voices of women composers.
In our early years, we played all three of Sofia Gubaidulina’s quartets—she hadn’t written her fourth yet. One of the most interesting pieces I think I’ve ever played is String Quartet 1931 by Ruth Crawford—an extraordinary, fantastic piece that we perform quite often. We’re also playing music by a lot of women composers this year. I don’t think we’ve ever excluded anyone.
It’s interesting that we started around the same time as the Kronos Quartet. We had quite a few composers in common, but as the years progressed, we went into different directions. In terms of relationships with composers and performances of new pieces, I think we may have had more than any other group in history. I’m not saying they were all masterpieces. But we like to give the composer the piece of string and let them do what they want with it. That doesn’t only include the famous artists we consider the most interesting—we love to encourage young people and do lots of workshops with student composers as well.

Your program for this milestone anniversary season makes a strong statement about the continuity of the Arditti Quartet. It’s not just about celebrating the past. You’ve made a point to introduce brand-new works, such as the two new commissions for this concert.
It’s obvious from the repertoire we’re known for what the Quartet likes stylistically. We’re open to quite a lot of things and not open to some things. But in a way I’m liking to branch out now. For this year I was particularly interested in having pieces by composers that have never written for us—such as Cathy Milliken, Chaya Czernowin, Sarah Nemtsov, and Stefan Prins—and some that we’ve never played. There’s no cutoff because it’s an anniversary. I’m not thinking: “We’ve got through 50 years, this is great. Now I can have a rest.” My thinking is: “Let’s continue.”

Interview: Thomas May

Notes on the Program

Jonathan Harvey
String Quartet No. 1 

The English composer Jonathan Harvey (1939–2012) had a profound influence on Irvine Arditti and his quartet, especially in their early years, and was among the first to invite the young ensemble to perform. His String Quartet No. 1 is the very first work the Arditti Quartet commissioned, and their collaboration was characteristically long-lasting: Harvey wrote all three of his remaining quartets for the ensemble as well. Composed in 1977 and dedicated to the Mahler and Britten scholar Donald Mitchell, the String Quartet No. 1 received its premiere at the University of Southampton in March 1979. Cast in a single movement, it begins with what Harvey described elsewhere as “an invocation to emptiness by sounding a ‘zero-sound’—a long, almost featureless note or complex” that he compares to the process of clearing the mind from “the tumult of a busy day” through meditation. In this case, it is the sound of natural harmonics played on the open D string. This beginning, which “invite[s] the listener to a quieter level,” is followed by an “innocent unison melody,” from which the entire quartet is generated. “Having written this melody I analyzed it (the first stage of departure from innocence) and used the background structure, a pattern of dominant sevenths mostly, to shape the piece as a whole,” writes the composer. “The melody grows in wisdom by acquiring ornaments, ‘radiances’ of doubling, by having its segments severely developed (in passages where one instrument plays the attack and another the sustained part of a note) and by absorbing violently energetic emotional outbursts.”

Cathy Milliken
In Speak

The Berlin-based composer and performer Cathy Milliken, who was born in Brisbane, is a founding member of Ensemble Modern and has worked extensively with György Ligeti, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, Fred Frith, and Frank Zappa, among others. Her varied output includes works for the concert hall, opera, radio, and film. On her new work, Milliken writes:
“It has been a privilege and an honor to compose for my friends in the Arditti Quartet for their 50th jubilee. Many years ago, I had the great fortune to go on tour with them, performing an oboe quintet by the English composer James Clarke. I recall my uncertainty about our tutti beginning. However, I eventually noticed a slight movement in Irvine’s shoulder—was that the secret key, that rhythmic sniff that preceded the upbeat? I may never know, too shy to ask back then and uninitiated into the mysterious brains of a string quartet. So it has been pure joy to be given the chance to divine again that upbeat and to create a musical adventure together.
“As the name In Speak suggests, the piece employs the use of voice as well, implying conversation or being in voice or in dialogue with others. A poem by musician Matthew MacDonald, entitled Octopus Rehearsal and written specifically for the Arditti Quartet, offers a textual and dramaturgical guideline for In Speak, reflecting on the intricacies of performing and rehearsing contemporary music as a quartet.
“The structure of the piece features a main energetic and hocketing-like thread derived from the quartet members’ names and initials. It reoccurs throughout, linking the various sections of choreographed sounds. Also, each member is highlighted at various moments with their own short evolving musical signatures. The use of voice is not intended to be theatrical but rather an extension of the players’ instruments. McDonald’s poem, when spoken by the players, is deliberately almost indiscernible. The focus lies with the articulation of words, their slight intoned shifts blending with the articulations of the bow; short whispered syllables become extensions of rhythmic pizzicati, and intoned vowels mix with the instrumental sound to suggest a microtonal haze. Thank you, Arditti Quartet, and Happy 50th Jubilee!”

Toshio Hosokawa
Oreksis

Born in Hiroshima in 1955, Toshio Hosokawa has enjoyed a long-standing presence in the European avantgarde, having found his place in the new music scene in Darmstadt (where the Arditti Quartet regularly mentored young composers at the International Summer Courses from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s). Encouraged by the Swiss composer Klaus Huber to cultivate a deeper knowledge of his native culture, Hosokowa took up studies of traditional Japanese court music, calligraphy, and Zen Buddhism. His unique fusion of Eastern and Western (especially Modernist) musical influences has earned him a reputation as the leading successor to his compatriot Tōru Takemitsu. He provides this introduction to Oreksis:
“The piece consists of a simple ascending and descending melody that intersects and is repeated over and over again, changing gradually. There is a mother chord from which this melody emerges. The ascending and descending forms are captured as light and shadow, yin and yang, and a sonic universe is formed. The title is a Greek word meaning instinctive desire. I chose it out of a desire to create music in accordance with the cosmic instinct (inner prompting) to fill the void (emptiness) of existence. I want to write music filled with ‘songs’ that overflow from within and cannot be controlled by reason. This piece was requested by Irvine Arditti to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Arditti Quartet and is dedicated to the performers of tonight’s premiere.”

Harrison Birtwistle
The Tree of Strings

Not until later in his career did Harrison Birtwistle (1934–2022) take up the medium of the string quartet, encouraged by his collaboration with the Arditti Quartet. His first full-scale quartet originated with a piece intended as a memorial, which was later extended to nine movements as an interlocking instrumental and vocal cycle involving settings of Paul Celan poems, the entire complex being titled Pulse Shadows (completed in 1996). Though no words are set in The Tree of Strings (2007), this half-hour-long quartet similarly has a poetic connection. The title quotes a poem by the 20th-century Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, who was raised in a strict Presbyterian milieu on the Isle of Raasay (between Skye and the Scottish West Coast). In the 1970s and ’80s, Birtwistle himself found a creative retreat on this island (its name means “Isle of the Roe Deer”). The Presbyterianism practiced on Raasay had prohibited music, and the island suffered significant population loss through enclosures in the mid-19th century. Birtwistle evokes this ghostly cultural history as well as the haunting, remote beauty of the setting. As often with this composer, a sense of mysterious ritual and “secret theater” becomes part of the proceedings. For live performances of The Tree of Strings, Birtwistle stipulates that a semi-circle of empty chairs surround the formation of the living and breathing musicians. 
At the outset, we hear anticipatory rustlings and coalescings—another form of meditation, perhaps—that signal the start of this journey through an idiosyncratic soundscape. Ensemble convocations contrast with solo forays into Birtwistle’s rugged, ever-fascinating labyrinth. The theatrics of isolation and spiritual desolation in The Tree of Strings culminate in the ensemble’s gradual exit from the stage, leaving the cello as a lone, protesting voice. —TM

Thomas May is a writer, critic, educator, and translator whose work appears in The New York Times, Gramophone, and many other publications. The English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival, he also writes program notes for the Ojai Festival in California.