In hcmf//’s early days, the view of its first director, Richard Steinitz, was that a festival of new music should showcase only new composers and performers. Return visits were neither expected nor planned for. However, the first visit of the Arditti Quartet in 1982 forced a change. In his memoir of the festival, Explosions in November, Steinitz wrote many years later that after the quartet’s debut, ‘it was soon evident that any such restriction was self-defeating’. For one thing, almost no other British quartet at that time would play an all-contemporary programme. For another, they readily brought with them a large repertory of fresh voices and contemporary masterpieces. Since 1982, they have appeared almost every year or two and have performed around 150 pieces, including more than sixty UK and World Premieres. They have become a backbone of the festival; likewise, hcmf// has been an important strand of their own story.
For that first visit, the quartet gave two concerts, on consecutive days. One was a characteristic mix of the well-established (Henri Dutilleux’s weightless Ainsi la nuit) and the new, in the form of pieces by René Koering, Vic Hoyland, Toshiro Mayuzumi and Torū Takemitsu. The second concert, however, was more consequential – for both the Ardittis and contemporary string quartet repertory in general. This was an authoritative morning recital of all of Xenakis’s chamber string music to date. As the festival’s featured composer that year, Xenakis himself was present. He was clearly inspired, and when the Ardittis returned the following year to break Steinitz’s golden rule of programming, they had a new work in hand: Tetras. This, it transpired, was Xenakis’s masterpiece for string quartet. It has since become an essential point of orientation for any new quartet.
Those first Huddersfield appearances contain in microcosm the story of the Arditti Quartet ever since. Recognised today – and for at least three decades before – as one of the world’s leading new music ensembles, their path has been almost entirely improvised, built step-by-step from incidental encounters, conversations and the after-effects of stellar performances. Commissions emerge from personal recommendations rather than any grand strategic plan; new repertory comes simply from enthusiastic listening.
Yet even as the quartet has explored new territory, it has always been concerned with building a contemporary canon. Favourite works are revisited over and again. So it is that Takemitsu’s A way a lone – a new piece in that first Huddersfield concert – reappeared at the Ardittis’ concerts in Tokyo this summer, where its inclusion was an act of gratitude to the composer who first introduced them to Japan. Meanwhile, Tetras has become one of a core group of pieces – alongside Lachenmann’s Grido, Ligeti’s Second Quartet, Ferneyhough’s Third and Carter’s Fifth – that the quartet have made central to their identity, performing them dozens if not hundreds of times. (And all of them at hcmf// at one time or another.)
Open-eared, tireless and brilliant, few ensembles can be said to have shaped the music of their time so definitively. Irvine Arditti, the quartet’s leader and sole continuous member, may be humble about his role – ‘I didn’t plan much, I just did’. But simply by enabling composers to pursue their wildest imaginings, the ensemble that he founded has transformed the possibilities of music for string quartet, and indeed our definitions of what a string quartet even is or can be: from videos and dancing in Jennifer Walshe’s EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT to an hour of total darkness for Georg Friedrich Haas’s Quartet no. 3 ‘In iij. Noct.’
Only once have they been caught off guard. Irvine first met Stockhausen at Darmstadt in the late 1960s, while he was still a teenager. For years he asked for a piece, to little avail. When one did eventually arrive, almost thirty years later, it appeared seemingly impossible. Stockhausen had written a quartet for helicopters, each one carrying a performer. Yet not only did the Ardittis eventually realise the infamous Helicopter String Quartet – with its thirty-minute aerial ballet, sound and video projections, and post-flight audience Q&A – they succeeded in establishing it as a serious and significant feature of the German composer’s late output.
For their twenty-fourth Huddersfield appearance, the Arditti Quartet will be opening this year’s festival. Previous anniversaries have been marked by celebrations of their repertory-building legacy – for their twenty-fifth, in 1999, they gave four concerts at hcmf// in which works by Ligeti, Ferneyhough and Xenakis were prominent, as well as Jonathan Harvey’s String Quartet no. 1, the first work written especially for them. For their fiftieth, they have taken a different tack, focusing their programming all year on commissioning composers who have not written for them before. Works by two of those composers – Diana Soh’s And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music and Chaya Czernowin’s Ezov (moss) – will be featured, alongside Kaija Saariaho’s Terra memoria from 2006. This fitting choice not only acknowledges the devastating loss of this composer to brain cancer last year (it is dedicated to “those departed”) but also sets the tone for a meditation on memory and the past. Building a future on what you have done: it is the Arditti way. Here’s to many more years ahead.
Profile by Tim Rutherford-Johnson
The 47th edition of Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, hcmf// 2024, takes place Friday 15 – Sunday 24 November 2024. Tickets for Arditti Quartet @ 50 are on sale now.