WATT clarinet quartet

Four clarinet players, sitting in the middle of the room, will perform an one-hour long drone. Using massively circular breath, working on overtones, unusual harmonics and textures with very slow changes.

WATT

Since 2011, the Paris-based clarinet quartet Watt (Julien Pontvianne, Jean Dousteyssier, Antonin-Tri Hoang and Jean-Brice Godet) explores the mazes of motionless movement, after more than 50 concerts throughout Europe and two albums (a self-produced vinyl in 2013, and the CD, 77’06, released on BeCoq records in 2015).

Long, tenuous and introverted – it is by straining our ears that we discern the variations, that soon entwine us in their net. Watt appears very hypnotic, from the intake of breath until its very end. The drone becomes more dense, thickens, expands, drips and dilutes itself, without ever losing its grasp around our neck. They are four, but sound like one, using the clarinet as a real wave transmitter. But unity is only surface. Everything is played below.

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"On the waste, beneath the sky, distinguished by Watt as being, the one above, the other beneath, Watt. That before him, behind him, on all sides of him, there was something else, neither sky nor waste, was not felt by Watt. And it was always their long dark flowing away together towards the mirage of union that lay before him, whichever way he turned. The sky was of a dark colour, from which it may be inferred that the usual luminaries were absent. They were. The waste also, needless to say, was of a dark colour. Indeed the sky and the waste were of the same dark colour, which is hardly to be wondered at. Watt also was very naturally of the same dark colour. This dark colour was so dark that the colour could not be identified with certainty. Sometimes it seemed a dark absence of colour, a dark mixture of all colours, a dark white. But Watt did not like the words dark white, so he continued to call his darkness a dark colour plain and simple, which strictly speaking it was not, seeing that the colour was so dark as to defy identification as such.

The source of the feeble light diffused over scene is unknown.
Further peculiarities of this soul-landscape were:
The temperature was warm.
Beneath Watt the waste rose and fell.
All was silent.
Above Watt the sky fell and rose.
Watt was rooted to the spot."

Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1942

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Entrance: 80 SEK

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Member production:Robin McGinley