Sat 16.6. 20.00 GALERIE

COMPOSITIONS BY THOMAS KESSLER AND CONLON NANCARROW

The collaboration between the Arditti Quartet and the American rapper Saul Williams must be one of the most unorthodox artistic partnerships of the recent past. The Arditti Quartet has been considered as the pre-eminent ensemble for contemporary string quartet music and Williams is probably the most powerfully eloquent voice emanating the underground of black hip-hop culture. The Swiss composer Thomas Kessler utilised William’s great poem NGH WHT (Nigger, what?) as the basis for his work of the same name for voice and string quartet: an incandescent sound texture as a backdrop for William’s incandescent language.
Transcriptions of the music of a further American outsider complement this programme: after 1948, Conlon Nancarrow abandoned the notation of his music and instead punched it out on piano rolls for self-playing player pianos. Released from the confines of what was humanly possible to play, Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano trod new paths in the creation of rhythm and tempo. Their adaptation for string quartet presents the instrumentalists with the highest imaginable challenge in ensemble playing.

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