Éliane Radigue: Occam Delta XV by Quatuor Bozzini

https://collectionqb.bandcamp.com/album/liane-radigue-occam-delta-xv

Genre: Contemporary Classical

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ plus (world heritage level)

released January 24, 2023

This is such an important release that it’s really important to me to do it justice when writing about it. Now that Radigue has reached her nineties I’m starting to feel a reverence for her similar to how I felt about Elliott Carter when he turned 100. Radigue is true royalty and we are very fortunate to have had this string quartet come to fruition through the dedicated efforts of both Radique and the wonderful Quatuor Bozzini. So often I think of the string quartet as the magnum opus of composers. Elliott Carter, Beethoven, and Bartok immediately come to mind. Of those, it’s only Beethoven whose string quartets are my unequivocal favorite works from the composer. This is not a proclamation that this is the best music Radigue ever composed. Honestly, I lack the confidence or certainty to say. The point is, it’s her string quartet and that’s very important from a historical perspective.

The music is stretching and droning and very much on the cutting edge. This is the true avant-garde. I suppose in some ways it was seeded by fluxus artists. However, the Occam Series might be most closely paralleled by Luciano Berio’s Sequenza and comparably important.

This music comes from a mind with as much experience and expertise with deconstructing and recreating sound as anybody on earth. Often microtonal refers to the sounds between the notes available through traditional Western musical notation (not to imply that composers have failed to work around the initial limitation) but it’s also more than that. It’s the sounds within the sounds that are forced out of their crevices and put on display.

This might not be on the golden oldies collections of the twenty thirties but humankind might catch up to it by the 22nd Century.