Adagio sans quatuor

The sound of this installation emanates from several sources: instruments created by Paul Stapleton and metal plates, suspended and equipped with systems of excitation and movement, to produce and modify the sound respectively. The musical work ‘performed’ is the Adagio of the ‘Dissonances’ quartet of Mozart; this version lasts approximately ten times as long as the original. Several performances, including recordings made by the Quatuor Diotima for this project, were proportionally time-stretched so as to coincide temporally, and then stretched again or transposed without time correction. Frequency bands from these recordings were then chosen according to the resonant properties of each instrument in order to provoke spectrally augmented (non-linear) responses from them; thus the Adagio is performed by objects who render the materials according to their own specificity, in a metaphorical relationship to the addition of individual instrumental timbre to the notes of a score. The work was premiered at the centquatre in June 2010, Festival Agora 2010, with funding from the SACEM, and technical support from Jean Lochard, IRCAM and SARC.