 Those who have seen the Quartetto Maurice play live have seen this on their faces, in their gestures: the long sweetness and the angry acceleration, the smile and the serenity, the eurhythmy and the euphoria. The latter has often accompanied their wish that everything should change. We know that when we want everything to change, we evoke fire: «The first phenomenon is not only the phenomenon of the fire contemplated in all its life and brilliancy during an hour of leisure, it is also the phenomenon caused by the fire. The phenomenon caused by fire is the most perceptible of all; it is the one that must be most closely watched; it must be speeded up or slowed down; we must grasp the point (or exact degree) of fire which leaves a mark on a substance». Flame, Bachelard writes in another essay almost thirty years later, is of all the objects that evoke reverie, one of the greatest operators of images: flame forces us to imagine. This is a truth that Fausto Romitelli knew well. Referring precisely to the synthetic work Natura morta con fiamme (1991), for string quartet and electronics, he explicitly refers to an imaginary scale, to an extremity which has a language without words, purely of relations, of which the essential elements are conventional and abstract, implemented by algebraic and combinatory processes. Dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli, the piece by Mauro Lanza, The 1987 Max Headroom Broadcast Incident (2017), for «augmented» string quartet, reflects precisely on what lies beyond what we always see – on the eye forced to watch and the ear forced to listen – we could almost say on the reverie that admires interference. The incident in the title refers to an act of television piracy that took place in Chicago on the evening of November 22nd, 1987. Andrea Agostini conceived Legno, sabbia, vetro, cenere (2009-10), for quartet and electronics. The composer formed the idea of using additive and «deferred» synthesis– a technique that the composer is pleased to describe as «very old» – to pursue an ideal he never then abandoned. This was writing electronics with a degree of control over detail and articulation of sound that aspires, one could say, to a very marked musical determinism. To control the rubbing, the attrition of the wood as much as the crystalisation of the silicon. Silvia Borzelli searches for a profound explanation with Earwitness (familiar 2) (2017), for string quartet and stereo soundtracks. The earwitness of the title is the person described by Elias Canetti in that strange collection of stories – or rather in that strange album of auditory physiognomies – that take their name exactly from the story of that name.
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