Jürg Frey belongs to the Wandelweiser group of composers, who tend to write slow, quiet, sparse music, interspersed with significant silences. Frey’s Third Quartet is to some extent a typical Wandelweiser creation, with dynamic markings that range from pp to ppppp. Less typical is the whispery voluptuousness of the harmony, which sometimes recalls Schreker or early Schoenberg. This is music of enveloping mystery and enigmatic beauty.

C’est un ballet délicat qu’a composé Jürg Frey et qu’interprète ici le Quatuor Bozzini — en 2004, les mêmes musiciens enregistraient, du même compositeur et pour le même label, Strings Quartets — et qui l’oblige même. Est-ce que String Quartet no. 3 (2010-2014), avec cet air qu’il a de respecter les codes, manipule en fait ses interprètes?

Dans un même mouvement, voici les cordes s’exprimant avec précaution puis allant et venant entre deux notes enfin dérivant au point de donner à leur association des couleurs d’harmonium. C’est que le vent emporte les archets et que les cordes, fragilisées par son passage, adoptent une tension dramatique qui n’est pas sans évoquer celle du Titanic de Bryars.

En compagnie des percussionnistes Lee Ferguson et Christian Smith, le quatuor interprète ensuite Unhörbare Zeit, suite de séquences instrumentales interrompues par des silences de plus en plus longs, et donc influents. Le flou artistique que respectent les violons ne leur impose aucun contraste: ils vont ensemble sur un battement sourd ou s’expriment d’un commun accord sur des paliers différents. Et c’est encore en instrument à vent qu’ensemble ils se transforment. Puisque Jürg Frey a changé l’air que les musiciens respirent en soufflantes partitions.

Jürg Frey is inextricably tied to the group of Wandelweiser composers and musicians, and like that group, his music continues to elude easy categorization. The last year has been a particularly fruitful one, revealing extensions to his compositional approach. There was the release of the two-disc set Grizzana and other pieces 2009-2014 for small ensemble on the Another Timbre label as well as his residency at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, featuring multiple performances of his pieces. Two other releases, Circles and Landscapes and String Quartet No. 3; Unhörbare Zeit deserve special focus as each represents the continued development of Frey’s compositional sensibilities. […]

Frey’s string quartets, particularly Striechquartett II, are some of his most absorbing pieces, particularly as performed by Montréal-based Quatuor Bozzini. In these pieces, the composer makes potent use of the microtonal nuances of the string instruments to elicit fragile, almost vocalized voicings of his poised harmonic structures. Where his second string quartet created a diaphanous scrim of sound, on String Quartet No. 3, he opens things up, introducing a spaciousness to the deft voicings. The members of the quartet are completely synched in to Frey’s strategies, fully embodying the tonal structures into a singular sound. Frey writes about this piece, “Elemental materials and constructions are thereby perceived as a sensation, and mindfulness consists in hanging these sensations in balance before they have arrived at the limitations of expressiveness.” And it is the way that the quartet hangs at the edges of expressiveness, letting the sensations of the notes and harmonies play out without investing them with dramatic expression. It is this equanimity and stability that allows the piece to play out in a totally absorbing way.

Unhörbare Zeit (inaudible times) adds two percussionists to the mix and here the structure opens up even more. The durations of silence are as central to the piece as the sounds of strings and the low rumbles of percussion. Frey states that he is working with “audible and inaudible durations that appear partly simultaneously and partly consecutively. They give the piece lucidity and transparency, as well as materiality and solidity.” While silence as a structural element has been fully absorbed into the vocabulary of contemporary composition, it is the way that Frey gives the silences weight and dimension within this piece that really stands out. The balance of the timbre of strings, low register percussion, the rustle of room sounds and the mercurial pacing of sound and silence is fully entrancing.

It begins, I suppose, with a title. For his third string quartet, Swiss composer Jürg Frey combines elements immediately recognisable to anyone who’s been following his work over the past decade or two with ones that might initially surprise, even if they too seem strangely familiar. So there’s the opening slow homophonic chords separated by long pauses, followed by a very quiet shimmering as the Quatuor Bozzini gently scratch their bows across their strings. So far, so Frey. But the chords sometimes fall into patterns that draw on cadences and sequences so common to Western classical music that they could have been lifted from a piece by Beethoven or Schubert — a tendency perhaps often latent in Frey’s music, but never so explicit (as far as I’ve heard) than here. Then there’s the gorgeous, swooning, long descent by a violin, like a falling ray of light, that gets passed on to the viola. Has the music of the Wandelweiser group’s most Romantic composer ever been more Romantic than this?

That title, though. Can it be possible today to write a string quartet without trying to work through a relationship to the history of the form and, by extension, pretty much the whole of Western orchestral music? Those familiar cadences and patterns strain for weightlessness — the ahistorical presence of light and volume. They don’t quite make it. Yet the shortfall, the gap between the certainty and inevitability they aim for and the precarity they land in, would itself seem part of the work, a negative space in which time runs backwards. I’m thinking of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), a concrete cast of the inside of a Victorian terraced house, with the imprint of doors, windows, and fireplaces left visible: architecture gaining historical consciousness. Could a string quartet become similarly self-aware? Listen to those chords: they are not random, certain among them repeat, so obviously that even I can hear it. They recall not just each other, but also a certain way of belonging together in time, a belonging that is itself a reference to another age of possibilities. These sounds remember, even as they strive for instantaneity. They desire both remembering and fading into silence, two times at once. For how much longer will anyone be able to write string quartets, anyway?

The second piece on the Bozzini recording, Unhörbare zeit, adds two percussionists to the ensemble, and emphasises the string quartet’s Romantic leanings with its contrastingly more open and exploratory style. There’s lots of shimmering, rumbling constellations of sound, an indistinct haziness that beguiles the ear. A call-and-response section of sorts is followed by high-pitched, almost screeching chords, then more gently, a sort of tip-toeing around. The work ends with a repeated two-chord dirge followed by a third, tense chord. Compared with the string quartet, Unhörbare zeit doesn’t shower the listener with beautiful melodies or overt Romantic references, nor does it wrestle with its relationship to the ghosts of music past; perhaps this results in a less challenging listen, though nonetheless an absorbing one.

Swiss composer Jürg Frey said recently that all good music should be felt in some part of the body, and that his music is intended to be felt just inside of the ear drum. It’s a neat image from the master of calm instrumental textures — a Wandelweiser group composer who explores silence as much as sound and writes egoless music that feels as though it’s always existed. Montréal’s Bozzini Quartet gave a virtuosically still performance of his Third String Quartet at this year’s Huddersfield Contemporary Music festival, and the group’s recording of the half-hour piece is beautiful for the up-close, quiet, grainy realness of the string timbres, every bow hair and every arm quiver audible. It’s an audaciously fragile performance. Also on the disc is an earlier Frey work, Unhörbare Zeit (Inaudible Times), made of danker chords and even longer open vistas.