Brian Ferneyhough - String Quartet No. 5 (2006) [Score-Video]] 

Brian Ferneyhough - String Quartet No. 5 (2006)
Arditti String Quartet:
Irvine Arditti, violin
Ashot Sarkissjan, violin
Ralf Ehlers, viola
Lucas Fels, cello
Preface (Brian Ferneyhough)
In the world of contemporary music the term ‘variation’ is treated with suspicion, the argument being that, since most post-tonal forms involve extensive variative treatment, so ‘variation’, as a formalised procedure, is basically redundant. When starting thinking about a new quartet, my first idea was to bring these general and specific connotations of the term into some sort of active conflict. After rejecting initial plans for three distinct variations movements, I finally settled on a single movement whose internal discursive energies would be engendered by the informal intersection, superposition and collision of three distinct originary states or materials. In the first half of the quartet, variants of these materials succeed in maintaining a certain autonomy; increasingly, though, the forces exerted on them by temporal compression lead to a claustrophobic and marginally chaotic renegotiation of mutual priorities. The work does not aim at a conventional synthesis; rather, an unstable, provisional restructuring allows distant derivations of the original materials to enter into a state of antagonistic exhaustion, as when, after the catastrophic depredations of a whirlwind, the ruined remains of complex structures reveal new aspects of their coexistence through communal subjection to irresistible external forces.
My String Quartet No.5 was composed in early 2006 and was jointly commissioned for the Arditti Quartet by Westdeutscher Rundfunk and the BBC. It is dedicated to the composer Michael Finnissy on the occasion of his 60th birthday.