violinists Irvine Arditti, founder and namesake of the group, and David Alberman, who played second violin from 1985-94. 

The quartet gave its first concert in September of 1974.  There have been a few changes in the three lower voices over the years, but it has been quite stable as a performing unit for most of its life so far.  A full list of the players can be found in the article about the group in Wikipedia, and, as is normal for these days, the quartet has a website with current information.  A brief biography of my two guests has been included at the end of this webpage.  Also, names in this presentation which are links refer to my interviews elsewhere on this website.

The Arditti Quartet specializes in new music, and gives many first-performances as part of its regular routine.  This has gone on since its beginning, and composers and audiences have come to expect brilliant renditions of the latest ideas, as well as current thoughts on recent works and "standards" of the 20th century repertoire.

They have given the world countless performances and have made a large pile of recordings that document their efforts.  We are lucky to have such champions of the latest of most cutting-edge ideas, and though most concert-goers still have no use for modern music, the fans remain faithful and others who are curious keep coming around and are often won over.


Bruce Duffie:  You are the founder of the Arditti Quartet and it bears your name.  Do you have any good or bad feelings about giving a quartet your own name?

Irvine Arditti:  Both good and bad.  We had no option.  We had to find a name in 24 hours and nobody could think of anything else.  It sounded foreign at the time because we were in England, so we decided to use it for want of anything better, and it sort of stuck.  Some while after we began we thought maybe we should call it something else, but then it was too late.

BD:  Has the personnel stayed stable, or have there been changes?

Irvine:  There've been some changes over the years; we've been going now since '74.  One person has changed occasionally.  We lost our viola player last year, who was one of the other original members, but our cellist has been with us since '77, so he's considered almost original.  But it's nice to have newer blood in the quartet sometimes.

BD:  Really???

Irvine:  Yes!  There's nothing wrong with a change.

BD:  I would think with four people, though, it would have to be rather a close-knit family.

Irvine:  It is, but if you make the right change, sometimes things can improve.

BD:  How much of a democracy is a string quartet? 

Irvine:  I think it depends on which aspect of the quartet one deals with.  When we're rehearsing or playing, it's complete democracy.  Everyone is throwing in their ideas and their opinions about what we're doing.  Obviously, for other aspects of quartet work, we delegate to various members certain jobs that keep the quartet running.  One person is responsible for certain things, but it's very much a democracy when we're working.

BD:  What about the selection of repertoire?

Irvine:  In many ways that's done by other people, but we are always consulting each other's opinions when deciding things; I suppose ultimately things are left for one person to make a decision, and when that happens it's usually me...  Usually, but not always.  Advice is always taken on matters when we're not sure about things.

BD:  You have a huge literature to choose from, and yet you select many new and untried works by tried and untried composers.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing, or just a thing?

Irvine:  Well, I think it's a thing; it's a good thing, and it's a bad thing.  We have lots of repertoire, certainly, but part of what we do is to play new music.  We will always continue to be interested in commissioning new pieces; we will never be short of composers coming to us with existing pieces, wanting us to play them, and this has always been part of our work and part of what we're set up to do.  There are many levels to what we do.  We concentrate on some of the classics of the 20th century, we concentrate on some of the contemporary classics from recent ten to twenty years, and we're also concentrating on very new music and getting composers to write things and playing music that's just been written.

BD:  Do you find that it's easier to come to a piece that has been played before, or easier to work with a new piece that is completely untried?

Irvine:  It's not a question of easiness; we do both things and we don't consider one more easy or more difficult.  In general, when we're playing older music, we tend to make our own opinions.  If we're playing an established piece that's been around for 50 years and we haven't played it before, then we come to it like a piece of new music and decide how to interpret it as if it were new.

BD:  You're working with the composers a lot of the time.  Do you have some who are more meddlesome than others, and some that leave you alone?

Irvine:  We don't consider it meddlesome.  We like composers to participate in our work and to influence us and tell us what they want, because we're here, in a way, to serve them and to play the music the way they want it.  If we disagree, then we'll probably make the final decision, but in general, we like to give authentic interpretations.  We consider that one of the great assets of playing new music.  After all, if you're playing music from the past, you can't ask the composer the way he wants it, but if you're playing music of today, you can; so why not?  We like that and we always try to work with composers before we play a piece for the first time.  I wouldn't consider it meddlesome; some composers have a lot to say about interpretation, and some are very happy to leave it up to us.  They might make the odd comment, which actually might be very useful.  Just the odd comment about which direction to go in interpretation is helpful.

BD:  Is this not something that's already on the page, or is it ambiguous?

Irvine:  I think it's always ambiguous; it's very hard to write down everything you want and it's equally very hard to see exactly what somebody wants.  After many years interpreting new music, you get a very good idea of what people want, but some people can just point you in the right direction just with a few comments.  Others have very specific ideas and are very clear about what they want, and it can be very revealing to work with them and find out their verbal ideas about what's on the paper.

BD:  Let me ask the big question, then.  Where is new music for string quartet going these days?

Irvine:  It's going in whichever direction people care to direct it.  We're not writing music, we're playing it.

BD:  But you must be observing the directions that are being taken...

Irvine:  We're observing the fact that there are many, many diverse styles going on.  I wouldn't say it's going in one or a few directions, like perhaps one could say when we began.  Every composer is writing in their own style and usually quite differently from the other!  There is no single direction.

BD:  Is it good that there is all this divergence, or does that make for more problems in interpreting these styles?

Irvine:  It does make for problems, but one learns by experience.  The artist is switching from one sort of music to another, and this is perhaps one of the hardest things, to give one sort of piece one's all and then in the same program switch the next piece to something that requires something completely different.  But that's something that one has to learn as an interpreter of new music, and it's actually one of the interesting things, that you have to be very diverse in your interpretation.

BD:  Are you becoming specialists in diversity?

Irvine:  Maybe!

BD:  Let me turn to the second violinist now.  Have you also played in orchestras?

David Alberman:  Yes, I did briefly before I came to the Quartet.

BD:  How is it different to play in an orchestra with a conductor, as opposed to a quartet which is more of a family?

David:  I'm the only second violin in the quartet, and nobody else plays what I'm playing.  That's probably the one big and obvious difference.  That doesn't mean, of course, that I have 100 percent control over the total product.  I'm one of four, whereas before I was one of one hundred and one, if you count the rest of the orchestra plus the conductor.  But of course it means I have a lot more control over my contribution.

BD:  Do you have 100 percent control over 25 percent of the product?

David:  Yes and no.  The great thing about a string quartet is that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  I find myself responding to the others which makes me do things that I certainly wouldn't have thought of doing by myself.  Sometimes that makes me a better player and sometimes it creates difficulties which are not there if you're playing on your own.  But it is enormously challenging, and in the type of repertoire we play, the second violin is treated fairly equally with the first violin.

BD:  So it's not like a Haydn quartet, where it's really a concerto for the first violin.

David:  Absolutely not.  It's not as though I'm the chief cook and bottle-washer in charge of the accompaniment, which I would be in a Haydn quartet.  I'm treated as one of four equal voices.  Sometimes I'm used in a lower register than the first violin, but often we're used as duellists or a pair of identical instruments.  The quartet is fundamentally uneven in that way; there are two identical instruments plus two very different instruments.  Some composers make use of that and it's fun.  It's never an easy option to be second violin, whether you're a classical quartet or whatever, but I need an E string a lot of the time.

BD:  So you are playing up in the top register as well as the middle and low.

David:  I find myself in quite unpleasantly high places sometimes...

just the pure musical sound of the instruments?

Irvine:  I'm not sure that any one person is responsible.  Because of my interest in contemporary music the quartet was founded, so perhaps initially I did more than the others.  In some ways I'm more responsible than the others for knowing, initially, what direction I wanted the quartet to go in, and therefore, in this instance, the sort of sound that we should make with certain works.  Though very much how we play is a product of the way we work as a group of four people.  When you're "in the groove," as we say, interpreting something, then everyone has to be connected and doing in the same way.  Therefore everyone is equally responsible.

BD:  But there is an Arditti sound, is there not?

Irvine:  I don't know; is there?

BD:  Do you want there to be?

Irvine:  I want us to represent what the composer is writing, so if an Arditti sound means that we're giving clarity to the compositions and interpreting them in a way which illuminates what the composer wants, then yes there is an Arditti sound.  But if you mean does everything sound the same in the same way, I hope not, because I would not like to think that we played a piece in the same way.  For instance, the music of Elliott Carter, to me very much tends to come from the music of the Second Viennese School, and one plays this with brighter, rich left-hand sound.  [See my Interview with Elliott Carter.]  The music of John Cage is very different as is the music of  Morton Feldman, and one would perhaps not play it in anything like the same way

you're giving the same sort of energy that you would be giving if you were playing in a concert.  I think it is very important to learn how to record and I hope we learnt that very early on.

BD:  Do you learn the piece in the performances to play in the recording, or do you learn the piece in the recording to play in the concerts?

Irvine:  Recordings come as the second thing; one obviously wouldn't record something if you don't know it, but it's surprising how sometimes it's the other way around!  Spending a lot of time on some details in recordings to really get them right, helps with the next performance.  I think they both complement each other, actually, but we wouldn't consider learning pieces in a recording studio to then perform.

BD:  But you must really learn them even better to get inside the nuts and bolts.

Irvine:  I think most of that work has to be done before you play, or while you're playing a piece while it's in the repertoire and being performed in concerts.  But it's surprising what somebody else might hear in a recording studio or what somebody's observing and makes you think even more about something and rehearse even more, perhaps in the session in order to get something better.

BD:  Do you ever find that after playing a piece and getting to know it during a season and then in the recording studio, you need to take it apart and put it back together again and find a new way to do it?

Irvine:  It's perhaps going further with the interpretation.

BD:  Do you ever feel that you're competing against your own recordings?

Irvine:  No; not really because one lives for the moment.  We're creating all the time as an interpreter, so you can't really think back to what you did in a recording session or how perfect it is because a concert is a different experience.  You must give something else that the recording doesn't have.  I hate to think that we're competing with other people's recordings, or even our own.  A performance must be considered an experience, something which is very special.  One gives of oneself in a concert, and one can be observed in such a way that it's something you cannot duplicate in a recording session.  Perhaps the concert has a certain percentage less accuracy than you had in the recording session, but it offers something else.

BD:  So it is a trade-off, then?

David:  Yeah.  In a sense you're looking for different things.  You have different aims.  If I'm listening to a recording, I don't want to hear a wrong note because it means every time I put that recording on I'm going to hear the same wrong note.  I don't like that.  But if I go to three performances of the same work, if they're fine performances in their own way, the occasional wrong note isn't going to mar it for me.  I think that points to the fact that one is looking for slightly different things when you're recording as opposed to when you're performing.

BD:  When you go to concerts of other quartets, do you look for different things than the ordinary person who just buys a ticket?

David:  It's like a dentist who meets someone who smiles at them; with the best will in the world, you can't help but notice things that are good or bad, or that they've done something in this way or that way.  But you try and suppress all of that because it's nice to try and enjoy the music

you know, it's a dirty job but somebody's got to do it.  We're often applauded for doing a worthy thing, and very few people are jealous of what we do.

BD:  "Thank God you're doing it so I don't have to"?

David:  Something like that, but in fact we enjoy doing it.  We do it all the time so the difficulties of grappling with the notation are not so great for us; we see this kind of thing all the time.  Strange effects and new ways to play the instrument come up all the time, but we're pretty hard to shock now.  I've played on every conceivable part of the instrument.

Irvine:  Almost.

David:  Almost.  Yeah.  I've played without a bow, I've played without a violin...

BD:  [Surprised]  Played without a violin???

David:  We've done pieces which are scored for four musicians, one bow, and one cigarette.

BD:  Is that music, or is that a gimmick?

David:  [Thinks for a moment]  I think the answer is that it's certainly not music the way that Beethoven is music.  I also don't think that it bears repeating, so to that extent there's probably something gimmicky about it.  But the idea of exploring the theatrical aspect of having four musicians onstage seems to me a perfectly valid one.  The problem comes when you confuse that with the job of a classical string quartet.

BD:  I assume that whoever wrote this piece wanted not just four musicians, but wanted a group of four that always played together.

David:  Sure.  The point of it is to tap into the potential of a normal string quartet but then do very abnormal things with it.  In order for anybody to get anything out of that, you have to set aside your notions of what a concert is and what a performance by a string quartet is, and look at it in a different way.  I don't think for a moment that there's any point in comparing and contrasting that with a work by Bartók or Schoenberg.

BD:  It's not better or worse, it's just different.

David:  It's different!  It's part of what we do, and what makes it difficult for audiences is that the category of what a string quartet does has expanded enormously, partly thanks to Irvine founding his quartet.

BD:  Well, how do you know when this far is too far?

David:  I don't think there's any such thing.  We don't have to worry about the judgment of history; it's going to happen anyway and the sad truth is that there doesn't seem to be any such thing as an unjustly neglected masterpiece.  I don't know how it works, but somehow pieces get recognized.

BD:  Eventually.

David:  Yeah, but not always eventually.  We play the Second Quartet of Ligeti [Photo at left] and it's not new; it was written in 1968, but I think that increasingly it's getting the status of a postwar 20th century classic.  And let's not forget that in eight years' time the 20th century will be the last century.  It will no longer be the century in which we live.  So I don't think it's particularly helpful or interesting to get too attached to the label of the 20th century to describe a musical phenomenon.

BD:  Pretty soon the 20th century'll be passé.

David:  Yeah.  I don't think all the composers in the world are going to get together on January the first of 2001 and decide how they're going to do everything different.

BD:  So in other words it's already evolving into the 21st century, and maybe by 2025 we'll look back and say, "Oh, yes, back in 1989 this trend started."

David:  Sure!  It's just like Romantic music.  Dates are for calendars and music history is a way of describing what happened.

BD:  But there seems to be a huge revolution approximately every 300 years.  Around 1300 there was a big revolution; around 1600 it was instruments; around 1900 we saw the breakdown of tonality.  It just seems like there there's this cyclical division.

David:  Yeah, although what seems like revolution when you're living through it looks much more like evolution when you look back on it from a distance.  Certainly in Schoenberg's case, the guy is usually held up for war crimes against tonality.  He certainly saw himself as evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  I was reading a note that he wrote in 1936 to his friend Alfred Newman [(1900-1970), American film composer, took private lessons from Schoenberg] who arranged for the string quartets to be recorded on the United Artists sound stage in Hollywood.  He wrote of his Fourth Quartet that for him, his music was like all other music and different no more from other music than one personality differs from another.  Now of course that's slightly idealistic, but he genuinely felt that; he simply felt that he'd spent his life writing the music that he wanted to write, and the fact that people stuck these labels on it was their problem and not his.

BD:  So if it hadn't been Arnold Schoenberg

This interview was recorded in Chicago on March 1, 1992.  Portions were used (along with recordings) on WNIB in 1993 and 1994.  The transcription was made and posted on this website in 2009.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award-winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.