for string quartet and live electronics 

This piece has itself a somewhat unusual history: it was composed for JACK quartet in order to be recorded remotely for a WDR3 broadcast in lieu of the live première of a much longer (20 minute), more complex work at the Wittener Tage für neue Kammermusik in April 2020. It is thus an “Appendix” added on to the original work. As the members of JACK could not meet to record under lockdown, we rehearsed and recorded the parts individually, with each player layering over the previous recording. I then performed the live electronics based on these recordings, and made the final mix. As this took place because of the last-second conversion of the festival to a radio broadcast on the one hand, and the conditions of the lockdown on the other, as well as I became more and more ill with COVID myself, this was all performed in a rather feverish - so to speak - state: this short movement was written and learned by JACK on a page to page basis over the span of two or three weeks, and our remote recording and mixing process took place in the course of one day. 

As for the work this short movement is appended to, its tongue-in-cheek title is a reference to my practice of compositionally "interpreting" or "representing" pre-existing musical utterances. Tim Rutherford-Johnson describes this process as follows: 

For several years now Alessandrini has started her pieces analytically. She begins with a pre-existing work, usually something canonic; examples include Purcell’s “Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary,” Mozart’s “Dissonance” String Quartet K.465, and Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht.” Then she collects recordings of the pieces and superimposes them, digitally adjusting the files so that even though the originals are all played at different speeds, in her composite version everything lines up. This preliminary model is then re-transcribed— selectively and creatively—to create the score. 

In this (my sixth) quartet, I shift the focus recursively towards analysis and representation in themselves. In Appendix 2, the material is derived from the Adagio movement of Schubert’s Quintet in C major (Op 163), but by combining successive iterations of the same material in different key areas, a Ravel- or Debussy-like succession of harmonies - full of parallel fifths - is achieved. 

In some short movements, I am re-representing works that I have already interpreted in previous compositions, or interpreting works I previously interpreted by re-representing my compositions representing them. In other movements, I attempt to use analysis, reduction and representation techniques derived from film and visual art: for instance, the way the colors in each single movie frame - or any other image - can be averaged into a single distinct shade; or Olafur Eliasson's arrangement of all of the colors of a painting, ordered by proximity to one another, into a ring representing their gradations into one another. By re-ordering the original work's constituent elements, I am seeking to distill something of it which can only be seen through this change of perspective. The distance created by these forms of re- representation foregrounds the act of interpretation itself, making it just as important as - or more so than - the work that is being represented.