On our blog, our contemporary composers present their favorite composer from our reperoire. This time Jean-Frédéric Neuburger introduces Salvatore Sciarrino's Sei quartetti brevi.

"I regularly feel compelled to listen to Sciarrino. His first six quartets, regrouped into a cycle called Sei quartetti brevi (1967-92), hold a certain mystery for me.

As is often the case with Sciarrino, the boundary between sound and silence is almost non-existent, with the exception of the beginning of the third quartet and a brief moment in the fifth. Each sound invites the sensitive listener to feel myriad emotions that change as the sounds change. For me, it’s one of the things that really makes me appreciate a piece: knowing that I can listen to it again and again and find new pleasures every time.

Suspended between a cycle of short pieces and a developed piece, they don’t seem to belong to either of those two categories of musical work. Instead, they remind me of a collection of poems. It sometimes seems like Sciarrino’s works have given life to a whole generation of string quartets that use those families of sounds: I’m thinking particularly of the cycle Liturgia Fractal, Alberto Posadas’s masterpiece and Yves Chauris’s two quartets.

The connection with nature appears to be of utmost importance. The first quartet can conjure up the noise of a far-off gust of wind. The third, the most fortissimo in the cycle, makes me think of a shooting star with its high glissandos. The fourth again reminds me of the wind, in a different way, almost like a “high filtered” version of the beginning of Debussy’s Dialogue du vent et de la mer. The end of that fourth quartet, short and surprising, for me feels more and more like a postscript added to the end of a letterlike a kind of warning. And finally, the sixth quartet entitled La Malinconia, makes a clear reference to birdsong, which disappears at the end of the piece in a kind of “Silent Spring”.

Do these sound references, the subtle delicateness of these pieces, have an underlying message? Are they an invitation to listen more carefully to nature, or to learn to listen to ourselves, perhaps?"