Programme note

…who holds the strings… is the second part of the triptych for four instruments Order of release, border of relish and the first part of the series for string quartet www. This quartet is thus located at the crossroads of two series. It is a meeting point between lines (the series) which cross through a network of pieces.

The title of the piece plays on the word "strings" (which both refers to a piece of string and to the writing for string instruments) and the expression "the one who holds the strings" which means "the one who holds the reins", or "the one who pulls the strings".

In this piece, no one holds the strings. The string quartet is conceived as a global entity, a kind of object which moves alone, driven by its own mechanics. The strings are tangled in a mobile and fragile architecture made of perpetually transforming microscopic elements, which never have any fixed location and whose articulation suffers constant alterations.
Tears appear, new links are tied then torn again.
Various forces such as attraction, repulsion, combination, phagocytosis, govern the objects, putting them face-to-face, and thus create an ever temporary morphology.

All the sound objects of the piece present a recurrent specificity. They overturn around a pivot, from left to right or up and down.
This oscillating gesture around an axis also governs the harmonic distortions (some chords are built in a reversed mirror-like relationship with the original chord), the melodic structures (repeated motifs around a pivot pitch), the melodic ascending-descending or descending-ascending curves around a horizontal axis, the registers (rocking motions between low and high zones of pitches), the dynamics (crescendo-decrescendo or inversely), as well as the swinging system between two musical situations.
An antagonism between the musical objects or situations can appear. A situation, with its persistence, can drive out another.

The articulation of very small and abstract objects, which are more principles of objects than objects (a simple gesture, the pivot around an axis, the rocking motion) raises the question of representation.
What can be perceptible when this representation is refused or impossible? What can be the variations of one same gesture, in which new perspectives can one make them appear? An envelope, a movement… Something runs along the sounds, at the border of what can be represented.
It is the insistence of the gesture that helps us to mark it out in a temporal course and attempts to draw the vague outlines of an invisible and inaudible real.

Clara Maïda, March 2004