Quatuor Voce

Fascinated by the indispensable role of music in cinema, our curiosity quickly turned to silent film—a genre rich with countless masterpieces and a vast field of exploration in terms of musical accompaniment.

A first performance of Murnau’s Sunrise (1928) convinced us to continue this experiment by placing the string quartet’s repertoire and improvisational work at the heart of the project.

Beyond the charm of “old-fashioned” screenings and the unique character of each performance, we believe that cinema nourishes the music lover’s imagination, and that these films can serve as a wonderful introduction to the world of the string quartet for some.

Below is an account by Paul Tortelier (1914–1990), a renowned French cellist (Excerpt from Paul Tortelier, Self-Portrait):

“ I started out ‘working the gig,’ as orchestra musicians say, at a run-down movie theater in La Plaine Saint-Denis, which was then a very poor neighborhood. For two years, I went there to play three evenings a week—Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays—to accompany the silent films of the time. (…). On Friday evenings, when the program changed, a stack of sheet music I didn’t recognize a single note of would be placed in front of me on a large music stand, so I had to start by sight-reading it all as best I could. In the humble movie theater in La Plaine Saint-Denis, there were only three of us musicians forming a piano trio, but I also played in more respectable venues where eclectic ensembles brought together as many as 10 or 12 musicians: an oboe, a clarinet, a trumpet, a cello, two or three violins, a piano, and so on. The conductor would lead while constantly watching the film, ready to press a button that would turn on a red light. At that signal—and depending on the film’s plot twists—whether it was a love scene or a horseback chase—the musicians had to stop right in the middle of a slow piece to launch into a gallop. We played Beethoven, Liszt, “Rêve d’amour,” and Wagner, as well as plenty of “filler pieces.” "