Arditti Quartet

John Cage was so impressed by the Arditti Quartet that he realised Music for Four together with the ensemble for the Cage Festival at Wesleyan University in 1988 and had it perform the premiere. The Music for Four score consists of four fully notated voices to be played entirely independently of one another. The musicians determine the temporal sequences with stop watches. Special elements of this work are the use of microtonality and the spatial positioning of the musicians, who sit far apart or turned away from one another in order to encourage the independence of the voices.
Navigations for Strings (1991) by experimental composer Alvin Lucier was also dedicated to the Arditti Quartet. The piece, inspired by atmospheric tones, consists of a small melodic cell that is gradually compressed to a single pitch that moves microtonally, imperceptibly as it were, through the acoustic space. The Five Small Pieces for String Quartet (1956) by La Monte Young are the first works that the musician composed in the twelve-tone technique modelled after Anton Webern. At the same time, they show the beginnings of a development towards minimalism and his so-called »Dream Chords«.
A further representative of minimal music is Terry Jennings and his String Quartet (1960), with only a handful of pitches and chords held for a long time between piano and pianissimo.
Visas (1985/1987), the three literature-inspired Episodes for String Quartet by Italian contrabass virtuoso and composer Stefano Scodanibbio, who died in January 2012, also bear witness to a minimalist manner of composing that concentrates predominantly on quietly progressing and multidimensional sound processes.