Quatuor à cordes et générateur de sons informatique
[Third work composed at the request of New Music Concerts, Toronto], “Coerced” String Quartet is a piece depicting a personal vision of all things that can be obtained, efficiently or not, by psychological pressure: sincerity, a secret, something one is ashamed of, a hidden side of personality, or even love, among numerous other possibilities.
Pressure here is applied to the music at the intersection of barlines, a non-hearable element of music notation that hasnonetheless a very strong impact on music in general as well as on its performers. (This is underlined in this compositionusing a sound external to the string quartet.) In fact one could listen to the piece only keeping in the mind the “barline”sounds and thus get the overall musical scheme, but the quartet’s reactions to the coercion exerted by those barlinescontains all the ethos or intentions of this music.
The composer, in those multiple reaction events, tries through some kind of self-torture to put forward hidden aspectsof his inner self, but beware, he might be lying or hiding the truth at times!
This note was not written under psychological pressure of any kind. — André Ristic