Clara Iannotta

You crawl over seas of granite

You crawl over seas of granite for string quartet was commissioned by the JACK Quartet and premièred at Ultraschall Berlin in 2020. It is Iannotta's most recent and most radical string quartet: "I knew I was pushing my sonic imagination as well as the physicality of their instruments to the limit". To make sounds blur, and to emphasise their noisiness and imperfection, she had the strings tuned down more than an octave. This caused them to lose their tension, and the musicians could barely control the pitch: "It was a challenge for me as a composer, for I'm a control freak. But in this case, I was rewarded for giving up control: this work revealed to me a new sonic space that I didn't even think I could imagine and that probably will define my music for years to come. As a composer, this is what I am after, expanding my utopian imagination". Score and instrumental parts.

Commissioned by JACK Quartet, with the support of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. World première: 16 January 2020, Ultraschall Festival, Berlin (Germany), JACK Quartet.