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String Quartet(s) (2000–2023) is a digital four-channel surround-sound composition by Luxembourg-Australian composer Georges Lentz. It is over 43 hours long and plays constantly, day and night, in its permanent sound installation setting, the Cobar Sound Chapel in remote Outback New South Wales, Australia.

Background

The composer started writing string quartet fragments from the early 2000s over many years. This music was then developed during extensive recording sessions between 2008 and 2020 in collaboration with the Sydney-based string quartet The Noise. The recordings included both notated music and free and guided improvisation, in both acoustic sound and with feedback pedals.^[1]

Structure

String Quartet(s) is structured around predominantly sparse musical textures with many thousands of tiny musical dots (delicate short notes) that suggest "a starry night sky"^[2] (Lentz) and form the context for some hugely dramatic, complex musical clusters which emerge from and are embedded in this meditative backdrop.

Techniques, themes and influences

Over its vast duration the music develops and varies a number of musical tropes, such as a star-like glitter, bird-like and insect-like sounds, musical unisons, quasi-tonal chorales, digital glitches and drones, electronic distortions of the acoustic sound, modernist avant-garde gestures, noise, multi-layered as well as very sparse textures, industrial as well as serene sounds, long haunting solo passages for the individual instruments, techno-like beats, layered spoken text, hiss, cuts, loops etc... - all of which is punctuated again and again by periods of silence. The music constantly varies or modifies these musical tropes, without ever repeating them in an identical way.

The composer also speaks about experimenting with "simple" AI tools. The overall effect is of a giant musical meditation which pulses, shimmers and fluctuates between mainly sparse time spans and sporadic clusters of dense musical activity, and which connects the listener to the vastness of the land, nature and sky of its remote Outback environment, as well as to the vast sparseness of boundless outer space.

String Quartet(s) is influenced by Lentz's reading of the epic poem Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion by William Blake (a quote from the poem can be found inscribed in the Cobar Sound Chapel's north-eastern wall) -

There is a Void, outside of Existence,
Which if enter'd into
Englobes itself & becomes a Womb

Some of the more active sections of the composition have an almost "apocalyptic" slant to them, in keeping with Blake's Jerusalem, and the composer has written about trying to "render the music of Blake's poem". He also speaks about the work being akin to "a vast canvas filled with audio graffiti".^[2]

The number 4 is an overarching feature of String Quartet(s), as it is of the Cobar Sound Chapel architecture by renowned architect Glenn Murcutt which houses the composition. The rhythmical proportions of 1/4/16 (or semibreves, crotchets and semiquavers in musical terms) is central to the music. String Quartet(s) is heard through four loudspeakers, which themselves often feature four musical lines each, or even four superimposed quartets. Thus the music, to the listener sitting on the Sound Chapel's central concrete plinth, consists of anything from silence or a single musical line to quartets within quartets within quartets.^[3]

According to Lentz, the process of recording itself became one of the central concerns of the composition and anything from high-end professional equipment to a tinny smartphone was used. Very different acoustics and distances to the microphone were also explored and thus dry close-up sounds and highly resonant music are sometimes heard over the top of each other, giving the impression of "chambers within chambers" (according to British musicologist Tim Rutherford-Johnson in CD booklet)^[3] or different perspectives at the same time.

Indigenous inspiration and collaboration

Lentz's love of Australian Aboriginal art, especially the work of Kathleen Petyarre and within her work one painting in particular with innumerable tiny dots, is also a major inspiration behind String Quartet(s), as it is behind much of the composer's music. A four-part glass artwork in the Cobar Sound Chapel's blue corner windows by local Indigenous artist Sharron Ohlsen features winding vertical dots which, according to the composer, are also “in dialogue with” the starry dots found in the sound art.^[1]