Antoine Beuger - Cantor Quartets

I did a post last Friday about my experience of performing a work by Beuger, one tone. very soft. rather short. which you can find here. Since then my fascination with Beuger's works seems to have expanded somewhat following some research into the Wandelwieser Group in general. I should briefly explain; Antoine Beuger is a member of the Wandelwieser are a group of composers, performers and artists, they have their own record label and publish their own works. Michael Pisaro (another member) talks about the history of the group and their ethos in this article, but to provide a brief summary, they are united in their fascination with silence and the boundaries / relationships between silence and sound based on post-Cagean ideas and aesthetics (Cage's 4'33" in particular).

Given that I have an inherent fascination with listening, this has its obvious appeal for me (in fact, unbeknownst to me, I have already discussed some Wandelwiesser works in my post about Philip Thomas's Jürg Frey performance here) so after my Beuger performance last week I decided to look further into his works. It would appear I was justly rewarded, as I have found a wonderful piece called Cantor Quartets, I have included an extract below:

The idea for the piece is based on four lines of music as seen above, each note is to be held for a long time and played very quietly. The work is to be performed by 4 instrumentalists (or I suppose possibly vocalists?) in a kind of round robin; player 1 plays the first line alone, to be joined by player 2 who plays the first line whilst player 1 moves on to the second, and so on until player 1 has finished playing the forth line. There is no necessary obligation for the players to begin their tones together, as you'll hear in the recording they often overlap to the performers choosing. The piece is further explained here.

What I find immediately appealing about Beuger's work is that it is ingeniously simple; the instructions in this case and in one tone. very soft. rather short. are minimal and comparatively sparse, but the sonic possibilities, implications and opportunities they create are genius. In this case, what you hear are not just long tones; I hear the scraping sound of rosined bow on double bass string; the quiet, almost sine-tone-like, transparency of a clarinet; the slight faltering in pitch and timbre as a player bridges the gap between sounding and not sounding; the overtones created by a double bass string; the beating patterns created when two tones sound closely together. It has a feeling of fragility I have never really heard before; the delicate boundary between playing as quietly as possibly but still being audible makes for a completely different listening experience.

There is also a recording of 24 Petits Préludes pour la guitare by Beuger on Spotify which I have just started to listen to - the sound of decay and overtones created on a guitar are quite beautiful.