Alfredo Aracil: Cuartetos de cuerda

Featuring

Anne-Marie North
Antonio Cárdenas
Iván Martín Mateu
John Stokes
Bretón String Quartet
Alfredo Aracil

Did you know?

1/7

Composer Biography

The works on this album span 35 years of Alfredo Aracil's career, from 1975 to 2010, representing a significant period of his musical evolution.

Compositional Technique

Aracil's compositional approach involves playing with an initial sound like a poet with a word, rotating, deconstructing, unifying, or diversifying it, and intentionally confusing it with all derived sounds.

Performer Biography

The Bretón Quartet, founded in 2004, is composed of members from the Orchestra and Chorus of the Comunidad de Madrid Foundation and the Spanish National Orchestra.

Compositional Technique

The composer frequently uses self-quotation and references to other composers like Machaut, Monteverdi, or Boccherini, challenging conventional notions of time and space in his music.

Composition History

Alfredo Aracil's first string quartet, Música de cámara, is titled after James Joyce's 1916 poetry book, Chamber Music, and uses two lines from it as a motto.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Alfredo Aracil, the composer, views the string quartet as a "clearing in the woods," a concept borrowed from thinker-poet María Zambrano, representing a central, luminous space for musical re-creation.

Compositional Technique

In Música de cámara (String Quartet 1), silence is as important as sound, with continuous long notes alternating with silences, a device that recurs in his later quartets.