Quatuor Béla & Moriba Koïta
Biography Quatuor Béla & Moriba Koïta
Quatuor Béla
Music of Today. Nothing more natural than wanting to play the music of one’s time…
Yes, certainly and yet…
The path we have chosen for ourselves is one that hasn’t been traced in advance.
The use of a repertoire in perpetual transformation – which questions our cultural reference points with each work – gives us the opportunity for constant inquiry. The four of us having graduated from the Conservatoires of Paris and Lyon, and trained in the now ancient discipline of the String Quartet, it is up to us to make our group of musicians thrive with the same boldness and intensity of those of the past. Surely this has been, for the last two and half centuries, the crucible from which composers have drawn their most experimental and intimate work.
Now, in the spirit of today’s artists, we would like to enrich our work with the influences of other types of music : electro-acoustic, improvisational, current and traditional. Our goal is to rethink stage space, the locations and structuring of concerts, as well as the relationship to the audience. We seek, through artistic encounters, not to stick to our strings, but to gather around us all the sensibilities that make contemporary art diverse. We are passionate about closing the long-standing gap between tradition and modernity.
Founded in 2006, the Quatuor Béla is composed of four young musicians from Lyon, graduates of the Conservatoire (CNSM) : Julien Dieudegard, Frédéric Aurier, Julian Boutin, and Luc Dedreuil.
They were united by their desire both to champion the contemporary repertoire (Ligeti, Crumb, Scelsi, Cage, Saariaho…) and to support all forms of musical creation : mixed media music, improvisation, musical theatre, and commissioned works.
They have performed in notable venues of today’s music scene, including the Musiques En Scène Biennale, Les Musiques Festival in Marseille, the Why Note Festival, the GRAME, Musique Action, and the GMEA, Arsenal de Metz.
Their innate desire for artistic exchange has brought them to work with artists of often disparate horizons : Jean François Vrod, Albert Marcoeur, Anne Bitran, Fantazio, Moriba Koïta. These collaborations have given birth to stage shows, an album, concerts, and projects, including Retour sur le Coissard Balbutant, Travaux Pratiques, Machina Mémorialis, and Impressions d’Afrique.
Convinced that scholarly contemporary expression deserves to play a vital and even unifying role in all music that is alive and new, they participate in events which are deliberately hybrids – at times acting as organizers, along with such companions of the road as Denis Charolles, Fantazio, and Sylvain Lemêtre, in which each performer aims to foster a modern, sincere and sensitive relationship with its audience : La Belle Ouie Festival, Carte Blanche to Fantazio in Calais, les Nuits d’Eté, Festival, La France qui se lève tôt, Carte Blanche to Quatuor Béla in Chambery, Musiques de Rues, Africolor)
