Fractal Nature

For five decades, vocalist-composer Meredith Monk has explored what she calls “primordial utterance,” or non-verbal vocal sound that lay beneath and beyond language, expressing “that for which we have no words.” This exploration has led her to create music that The New Yorker describes as simultaneously “visceral and ethereal, raw and rapt,” an art that “sings, dances and meditates on timeless forces.” With her latest, multivalent ECM New Series album, Monk aimed to address ecology and climate change, she says: “Believing that music speaks more directly than words, I worked to make a piece with a fluid, perceptual field that could expand awareness of what we are in danger of losing. On Behalf of Nature is a meditation on our intimate connection to nature, its inner structures, the fragility of its ecology and our interdependence.” Voices and instruments have equal weight: sometimes each is heard alone; sometimes they are blended to form a new, mysterious sound; sometimes they are combined to create intricate, layered, yet transparent sonic landscapes.

This new work by Spanish composer Alberto Posadas, composed from 2003 to 2007, is not a collection of string quartets, but rather a cycle of five quartets, meant to be performed as a whole with only brief pauses punctuating the parts, 52 minutes in all. It is performed here with energy and precision by the Quatuor Diotima, and recorded in January 2009 for Kairos.