Osvaldo Coluccino: String Quartet

Osvaldo Coluccino
notes for string quartets (2002-2008)

Moment (Moment)
Just the hint of a quality that, in the shortest as well as the immeasurable span of time, the event could fulfill. That regenerates, starting from leaving the vicissitudes of life (history and thought) to transform and make its own surface shine, on which the sensation will be reflected like a flash of light. This happens with the greatest speed imaginable, traversing the totality of the experience (which becomes anti-episodic), a sensation that recaptures everything that passes and then disappears again.

The composition begins with a quasi-pointilism in counterpoint, setting the tone for each note sealed moment, both autonomous magnet and catalyst. The piece, however, is notable for different sections, such as moments of chordal stretching or the extended central section where, shared among all four voices, fast phrases of controlled pitch spread in octaves, play with ease on the bridge, intertwine and answer each other. And so on – to discover…

Aion (Aeon)
Personification of a certain type of time, namely that which eludes the 'safe' prison of calculus, 'eon' is the Greek personification of unlimited time.

The first part is a desert, the depiction of oblivion in a dust that flows as dissonant as it is sweet. The non-discursiveness here combines with the precision of atonal intervals of changing nuclei. The instruments almost always double their actions in duets, which, multiplied by four, create an orchestral impression. The second part, on the other hand, deliberately interrupts the flow. In this second form of ›attack‹ on the claws (and revocation) of time, variants emerge in the formal structures – starting from islands of sound set into nothingness – that often demand vertical virtuosity from the performers: rhythmic micro-fragmentations, tensions owing to fine dynamic gradations and special overtones, inexorable dialectics in fours, etc.

The title has already been used in recent music history; but mine is a case of non-mysticism. My position can be summed up with an exemplary quote from Gilles Deleuze: »[...] this aeon as straight line and empty form is the time of events-effects. As much as the present measures the temporal realization of the event, i.e. its embodiment in the depths of the acting bodies, its embodiment in a state of things, the event in itself and in its insensibility, its impenetrability is not one of the present, but gives way backwards and forwards, in two directions at once [...]. Only Chronos is filled with states of things and object movements, which he provides with dimensions. But as an empty and unfolded form of time, Aeon subdivides to infinity precisely what haunts it without ever inhabiting it [...] unlimited like the future and the past, but finite like the moment.« (from: Gilles Deleuze, The logic of meaning, from the French by Bernhard Dieckmann, Frankfurt am Main 1993; original title Logique you sens, Paris 1969)

Eco real estate (Immobile Echo)
Our perception begins with the paradox of the title: an echo that negates its peculiarity, that of moving or lengthening, multiplying, losing... Here it is indeed the case that the echo initially the result of resonance, but eventually transitions into a state of fixed immobility in which one can linger and enjoy without losing it, as is the life perspective of a sculpture, for example. This is my petrification of volatility.

An opening mirrored in the closing, and in both said immobility unfolds through elaborate strategies of suspension; a central part in which, on the other hand, the echoes reverberate from a static ground (hit and settle here) means that there is an action of the three strings here, supported by immobile piano sounds.

Cutting (offshoot)
A duet with a title consisting of a single word, but which nevertheless harbors semantic possibilities in its duality (the contradiction resolved from the ideal of a recomposition of dualism in unity), which points to a birth via a pre-existence, which mutilates and implants itself. The second meaning of the title, that of a musical nature, is only touched on intellectually.

A piece divided into three sections: at the beginning a modulating continuum of bare, sizzling and intermittently interrupted sound, thanks to the fact that the two instruments produce 'halos' with the back of the bow, i.e. bowing with the wood in the traditional way with the hair, a continuum that at a certain point is thwarted by solo microphrases; a central part made up of individual thin sound events in a sidereal void; the third part is formed by the ecstatic and exotic union of the couple, at the end itself subjected to a single pedal note on which strands of gold, swayed by a breeze, glide.

Osvaldo Coluccino
German translation: Ulrich Mosch