Antoine Beuger composed his ‘Cantor Quartets’ in 2003. There are 15 pages in the score, four of which are presented on this double CD. Each page contains four lines with seven notes each, all of which should be played gently and for a long or very long duration. Instrumentation is unspecified, and the notes can be played in any octave.
Formally the piece is constructed a bit like a round such as ‘Row, row, row your boat’, in that Player A plays the first line as a solo, then when he/she moves on to the second line, Player B starts the first line. Player C starts when Player B begins the second line and Player A starts the third, and so on. The page finishes when Player A finishes the fourth line.
So each page slowly becomes denser as it progresses, starting as a solo, becoming a duet, then a trio, and ending as a quartet.
This realisation was performed in the church in the village of Combe near Oxford. Each of the four pages was played just once without rehearsal. Various aircraft passed overhead during the course of the afternoon, and these sounds became part of the music.
