Quatour Bozzini, in Montréal, is one of the leading contemporary music ensembles, and a frequent collaborator with Lucier. As Isabelle Bozzini, a founding member of the quartet, describes, in the winter of 2020, Lucier asked if they would release the live recording of a 2015 concert of his music. Instead, the quartet decided to make an entirely new album. Bringing together echolocation ideas (there are two performances of Group Tapper) with explorations of frequencies in concert and conflict (Navigations), Navigations is a superb way to hear Lucier as he expands out of the Western art music tradition.

"… Navigations is a superb way to hear Lucier as he expands out of the Western art music tradition."

Best of 2021: New/Experimental Recordings

Michael Schell, Sequenza 21, 3 janvier 2022

There are few composers whose music better fulfills the potentialities of the old saw “It’s not for everybody — then again it doesn’t try to be” than Alvin Lucier (1931—2021). This album, documenting a 2015 Quatuor Bozzini concert devoted to the late ultraminimalist, is a commendable addition to his difficult-to-record legacy.

"This album, documenting a 2015 Quatuor Bozzini concert devoted to the late ultraminimalist, is a commendable addition to his difficult-to-record legacy."

2021 — Best Albums of the Year

Un ideale excursus nelle indagini microtonali e “concrete” del decano della sperimentazione sonora, qui applicate a un ensemble di soli strumenti ad arco: intuizioni tanto essenziali quanto pregnanti, rivolte all’ascolto profondo di una vasta e inesplorata fenomenologia sonora.

"Un excursus idéal dans les recherches microtonales et concrètes du doyen de l’expérimentation sonore…"

Review 

Ken Waxman, Jazz Word, 7 juin 2021

Adding to its stellar reputation for commissioning and performing experimental notated works, Montréal’s Quatuor Bozzini (QB) interprets five compositions by American composer Alvin Lucier on Navigations. Barbed, dissonant and compelling at the same time, these variants on works by the 90-year-old sound explorer have as much in common with traditional string quartet repertoire as Cecil Taylor has with Lang Lang. Formed in 1999, QB’s members — violinists Alissa Cheung and Clemens Merkel, violist Stéphanie Bozzini and cellist Isabelle Bozzini — have fused into a single unit of multiple moving parts. There are no soloists per se, and faithful to Lucier’s vision the timbres often resemble those from a percussion ensemble rather than a string quartet.

This is especially true on Group Tapper where the resonations appear to be created from combining smacks from the bows’ frogs, col legno string slaps and raps on the instruments’ wood to create call-and-response. As hammering moves from one to all players, tempos accelerate, first to presto and vivace, then to metallic sounding prestissimo until the soundfield is crammed with percussive ruffs. While other tracks are devoted to more conventional string strategies, the jagged and near impenetrable tones remain, encompassing hints of detuned scordatura. Detours into wispy and near-vocalized expositions are there, although the concluding Navigations for Strings offers the most bellicose challenges. As the players’ parts combine with layered and thickened tones a horizontal, undulating theme is revealed that becomes a near static, almost unbreakable drone. The climax and respite arrives when the unison strained buzz gives way to single string vibrations.

Formerly QB has created exemplified programs of composition by Ana Sokolović and Phill Niblock among others. Navigations is another defining work.

"Navigations is another defining work."

Critique

Pierre Durr, Revue & Corrigée, n^o 128, 1 juin 2021

Avec Navigations, le Quatuor Bozzini nous plonge dans deux voire trois approches différentes du travail du compositeur américain.

There have been many technical and technological innovations in music since 1945 but one of the most important aesthetic innovations has been in new ideas that focus on listening. Innovators like Pierre Schaeffer proposed the idea of reduced listening — an attitude in which sound is listened to for its own sake as a sound object, removed from its source. John Cage invited listeners to hear any sound as music. Pauline Oliveros encouraged listeners to actively experience all sounds through a practice she described as “deep listening”. These ideas all contributed to contemporary music’s focus on the experience of sound itself.

Alvin Lucier’s compositions and installations make use of sounds that are often the results of acoustic phenomena. His work focuses our attention and perception on the physical presence of sound interacting within a particular space. Performing Lucier’s compositions requires performers to learn to recognize, activate, play and interact with acoustic phenomena. The Quatuor Bozzini were clearly up for the challenge when they recorded Alvin Lucier: Navigations. The album opens with Disappearances, a piece that is a single note. That description may sound like it is minimalist to the extreme but to my ears it is a piece rich with development. You hear changes in weight and timbre as each string joins together in unison. The controlled motions of the string’s bows cause phasing and filtering of the sound. The tiny subtle changes in pitch causes beating which reveals pulsating difference tones. Each of these phenomena disappear into one another creating a feeling of movement and making the listener aware of the tiniest changes in pitch and timbre.

The album contains two realizations of Group Tapper, a piece that explores room acoustics by having the instrumentalists treat their instruments as percussion. The performers tap on their instruments in various places and reflect the sound coming from their instruments around the room. The recording engineer does a great job of making the room present on this album so that you can really hear how the group’s performance interacts with the room. Placed in between the two realizations of Group Tapper is for me the most striking piece on this recording, Unamuno. The piece was inspired by early twentieth century Spanish writer Miguel de Unamuno and it was originally written for voices. Unamuno is based around four pitches that are continuously arranged into different patterns. It has a probing and questioning kind of vibe to it. The Bozzini’s perform the piece with both strings and their voices. The result is absolutely stunning.

A phlegmatic, imperceptible digressive motion unfolds in the shifting unison of Disappearances (1994): at first extremely sharp and compact in shaping an apparently flat acoustic surface, with remarkable control the quartet alternately slides through the tiniest intervals of the instruments, producing the illusory beats that occur in the gap between immediately adjacent frequencies; a fleeting sense of void also accompanies the changes in direction of the bows, like subsidences in the fragile weft of a fabric under the effect of a constant tension.

Composed the same year, Unamuno consists of twenty-four reconfigurations of the same four semitones, vocally replicated by their own creators: an element that accentuates the ritualistic, albeit rigorously objectivating character of Lucier’s performative pieces, comparable to the projection of geometric directrices intended to converge and fuse into a lucent synthesis of complementary colors.

The double iteration of Group Tapper (2004) brings us back to the first CD of the recent collection String Noise (2020), occupied by a patient “measurement” of space conducted by following the reverberation of the bow strokes reflected by the bare walls of an art gallery. The interweaving of rhythmic patterns put into action by Bozzini is however much more lively, even nervous, as it exceptionally makes them pass through a sphere of relative naturalistic mimesis: the curved wooden bodies, struck on their every part with the hard ends of the bow handles, cross in fact a range of timbral solutions that seemingly extends from the patter of busy birdies to the ferocious tumult of the (urban) jungle. These are the most markedly theatrical episodes of the program, performed at physical distance while slowly moving, in order to conjugate the sound gestures and the architecture of the concert hall, the fifth “instrument” which, on closer inspection, plays a fundamental role in each phenomenal instance conceived by Lucier.

Lastly comes the title piece Navigations (1991), previously recorded in the studio by the always formidable Arditti Quartet ( Mode, 2003): deliberately played out on the verge of minimum dissonance, the perpetually unstable scenario sustained by the quartet simulates a spiraling descent into the psychoacoustic depths, home to faint hallucinations once again caused by the changes of tempo and microtonal oscillations in constant interrelation. A true paradigm of the quietly sublimating aesthetics of Alvin Lucier, an irreducible master of contemporary experimentation who, thanks to the passion and sensitivity of the Bozzini Quartet, receives here one of the most substantial discographic tributes released in recent times.

Le Quatuor Bozzini nous hypnotise et nous envoûte du début jusqu’à la fin de cet album. Un album qui devrait rayonner bien au-delà des publics habituels de la musique actuelle. L’œuvre d’Alvin Lucier est accessible, comme l’est par exemple celle de Steve Reich, et l’excellente interprétation qu’en fait le Quatuor Bozzini a tout ce qu’il faut pour devenir référentielle.

"L’œuvre d’Alvin Lucier est accessible […] et l’excellente interprétation qu’en fait le Quatuor Bozzini a tout ce qu’il faut pour devenir référentielle."

Review 

Tom Piekarski, Exclaim!, 2 février 2021

Montréal-based string quartet Quatuor Bozzini have been a mainstay in the Canadian classical music scene for over two decades. Favouring the avant-garde end of the musical spectrum, the quartet has been unafraid of suffusing playful and inventive interpretations throughout a repertoire dedicated to experimentation. Off the heels of 2020’s buoyant Ana Sokolović: Short Stories, Quatuor Bozzini pare things down with Alvin Lucier: Navigations, an ode to the quartet’s relationship with the titular American composer and his material. 

This collection of five tracks recorded in concert is timely, as Alvin Lucier’s reputation has been crystallizing as of late. A contemporary of minimalist pioneers and a towering figure of experimental and contemporary classical music in his own right, Lucier and his recent work have been celebrated anew by labels like Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle Records. 

Quatuor Bozzini’s collection is a welcome addition to the attention on Lucier, especially given this release’s focus on some of the composer’s lesser-known works for string quartet. While Lucier’s most applauded pieces tend towards less conventional instruments, the quartet succeed in conveying his interest in relationships between the acoustic phenomena of a place and the instruments and amplification systems around. Disappearances announces what we should expect from Lucier when composing for strings; a deep respect for the power of a sustained string. The piece utilizes unison violin and cello tones to gradually bring out the characteristics of the room. Two versions of Group Tapper are highlights, as they display the sonic variety that can be had when all four players are tapping the bodies of their respective instruments in a different place and at different tempos.

Listeners with only a passing familiarity with Lucier’s work might detect layers of conceptual baggage in the quartet’s performance, but it is important to note that the best results are achieved if one assumes that Lucier is trying to lay as bare as possible the sonic characteristics of the materials that performers have at their disposal. Whether a recording was made in the composer’s bedroom or in a concert hall, featuring the bowing of a violin or a brain’s alpha waves rendered audible, the substance of Lucier’s work often is in the particulars of an interaction. Quatuor Bozzini’s release is an occasion to celebrate what is ultimately the fearless act of letting the sounds of one’s world ring naked for others to hear.