Fosfeni - Yeznikian/Asasello Quartett - UNEARTH Score follower

Fosfeni - Yeznikian/Asasello Quartett
UNEARTH Score follower
© special courtesy of The Asasello Quartett performing
“Fosfeni” (for String Quartet)
written by Franck Christoph Yeznikian (2021, ca. 10 min.).
Premiere : September 25, 2021, Kunststation Sankt-Peter Köln.
Rostislav Kozhevnikov - Violin
Barbara Streil - Violin
Justyna Sliwa - Viola
Teemu Myöhänen - Cello
This second String Quartet was recorded by Cologne radio WDR.
Mastering and Score follower by © UNEARTH.
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Fosfeni, this second String Quartet was composed as a gift for Robert HP Platz with whom I studied for two years to finish my composition studies at the Maastricht Conservatory. The title is coming from a collection of poems from Andrea Zanzotto whose 100th anniversary of his birth was celebrated in 2021.
As often the title gives me the formal structure of a piece even if they are grafted with many references to the way of a Weaving.This what I called a "tramaturgie" ; neologism made from the words Web (Der Schuss) and Dramaturgy. Consequently, the seven letters of Fosfeni cut the piece into seven sections.
Seven is a significant number that often comes up in my music as can be found in the names of the painter Twombly, with Orpheus for example.
The question of the Space is essential in my listening. In Fosfeni, I thought of the arrangement according to another form of listening by placing the first and second violin in the center. This offers a bicinium surrounded or framed by another duo composed by the viola and the cello.
This piece accentuates some elements I am questionning in my music and especially here in the attempt to relate an effect produced by the singularity of Andrea Zanzotto’s poetry, inside a diaphanous lyricism. The question that arises for me in reaction to the world goes through listening through certain risk-taking where I hold the interpreter accountable. I am against effective writing, that is to say writing that would not ask any question. There are more assumptions and promises in writing than absolute effectiveness. This is what distinguishes, to follow the thought of Paul Celan, the gesture of Artisana (Handwerk) from that of Art (Kunstwerk) for instance. To what extent to write is to tend towards the other (the musician) a fragility of which he finds himself to be the smuggler if not the Subject (Ich-Selbst)?
How can this be transposed into music for example? By going as far as subtle textures in the timbre by overlaying levels of presences. Hence the use of practice mute. Something like a laitance to produce some transparencies. Also to measure also the innevrved tension in the timbre according to lengthening durations without abandoning a contrapunctic discourse. By also daring to write with a scala in eighth of ton.
In one of his books, Georges Didi-Huberman mentions in Survival of the Fireflies, the disappearance of these insects because of light pollution in particular.
Therefore, what would still be these regions in art, where the composer, the performer and the listener could intersect in this texture of listening where fragility might survive against road rollers of consumption ?
A work is made to last and tries, today more than yesterday, to contain a utopian dimension. It is without doubt there that would reside within our reach, a promise in the sense that a work of art must contain reserve in the two sense of the word: not to give everything and to keep for (of) the future.
At the end of this score is a question:
Combien de temps laisse-t-on encore à l'avenir ?
How much time do we still giving to future?
Franck Christoph Yeznikian
www.franckyezn...
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