Performance
Nordic Affect performed the music of Quartet for a Landscape live at Mengi in Reykjavik on 16 October 2021. The work was performed once; experienced ‘live’ only by the people in that room. The string instrumentalists used small DPA microphones, mounted on their instruments, that captured more of the ‘grainy’ qualities of their performance, generating a strangely intimate listening relationship. The harpsichord, likewise, was recorded closely. This heightened the instrument’s mechanical quality. In analysing Ligeti’s Continuum, for example, Mike Vaughan writes ‘It is significant that the richness of the mechanical sound of the harpsichord can often only be fully appreciated… when it is placed under the sonic microscope of an amplification system either in performance or through recording. At this point the instrument changes into the “amplified harpsichord”’ (Vaughan, 2000).
