Quatuour Mémoire ‘Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn’ Album Preview

 The debut release (available December 12, 2025) from Montréal-based Quatuor Mémoire emerges from one of those rare moments of serendipitous convergence. The idea for the album was born—almost by chance—in the summer of 2023 at Darmstadt. There, the composer of this recording’s titular piece, Olivier St-Pierre, was speaking with cellist Audréanne Filion, who was telling him enthusiastically about a brand-new ensemble she was forming dedicated to promoting contemporary repertoire for string quartet. Filion was already familiar with Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn, having worked on the piece with St-Pierre while they were still studying at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal in 2022, and offhandedly suggested that this new group of hers revisit and record the work. The following year, this nascent ensemble would become Quatuor Mémoire.

St-Pierre and Filion discovered that this casual conversation had generated more momentum than they had envisioned. With the quartet already learning this piece, they thought, why not build a program around it and present it in concert? St-Pierre was quick to offer composers Florence M. Tremblay and Louis-Michel Tougas as candidates to round out the bill. Mémoire adopted Tremblay’s Insides for the project while Tougas was eager to compose something new, resulting in his String Quartet No. 2.

After this program was performed twice in the fall of 2024 on events co-produced with Montréal’s Collectif Radiance, the group returned to the subject Filion’s initial proposal — recording St-Pierre’s hefty 34-minute piece, with Tougas as the engineer and producer. Yet, the aforementioned momentum still showed few signs of diminishing; everyone involved remained sanguine about the larger collaboration. The frst half of 2025 saw them recording the other two works, again with Tougas behind the controls.

It also saw Tougas putting together his new imprint, Mnémosyne. Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn is the label’s very first release but there are already a number of other projects in preparation with ensembles from Montréal and beyond. The label aims to serve as a platform for the dissemination of new avant-garde works, while fostering research, refection, and musical experimentation.

The three works on the album provide an exciting survey of Montréal’s young generation of composers. Montréal has long been the epicentre of Québec’s distinct vision of modernism, and Tremblay, Tougas, and St-Pierre each honour this legacy in a sense albeit through completely individual means. Insides is propelled by Tremblay’s varied deployment of microtonality interleaving quarter-tone harmonies, just intonation, and swooping glissandi within a structure that embraces hypnotic colour-feld like textures and vivacious counterpoint alike.

Tougas’ contribution, his second string quartet, is permeated by a dream-like, undulating quality that remains even as certain passages build into tense rhythmic interplay or as bow grind across the strings. Ultimately, the soft drifting character prevails, with the work unravelling with three sumptuous minutes of pastel surrealism.

The title of Chronos, Kaïros et Aiôn refects its composer’s background in philosophy through its reference to the three concepts of time in classical Greek thought. It also indicates St-Pierre’s acute sensitivity toward all things temporal, making for elegant forms populated with intricate gestural phrases. The instruments also employ a unique that permits him to explore an engrossing world of colour through natural harmonics.

Each of these works is not only meticulously detailed sonically but also technically demanding, so the fact that Quatuor Mémoire is able to so thoroughly embody these dynamic, timbre-rich, microtonal works on their debut recording makes it as much a testament to their outstanding instrumental abilities as a lucid document of these three formidable younger composers.

Formed in 2024, Montréal’s Quatuor Mémoire comprises Bailey Wantuch and Meggie Lacombe (violins), Marilou Lepage (viola), and Audréanne Filion (cello), graduates of the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. Their name refects their mission: to contribute to the formation of collective memory through the creation and dissemination of today’s repertoire.

Mémoire has worked with composers of various musical backgrounds and aesthetics such as Francis Battah, Lucas Fiorella, Frédérique Le Duc-Moreau, Anita Pari, Simon Rivet, and Yuliya Zakharava. This album is the result of a long-term collaboration. In addition to this more recent body of work, Mémoire is also invested in exploring Canadian works from the 20th century, and has featured quartets by Jean Coulthard, Serge Garant, and John Weinzweig. Notably, they gave the frst full performance of Serge Garant’s Trois pièces pour quatuor à cordes (1958).

Since its founding, Mémoire has collaborated with several crucial Montréal-based institutions, such as the Canadian Music Centre in Quebec (CMC), the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur, Collectif Radiance, No Hay Banda, the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), and Le Vivier. Mémoire has also performed at the SMCQ’s festival Montréal Nouvelles Musiques.

Florence M. Tremblay is a composer, cellist, and chorister from Rimouski, now based in Montréal. She holds a Master’s degree in instrumental composition from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, where she studied with Nicolas Gilbert, and a Bachelor’s degree in cello performance from the Conservatoire de musique de Rimouski, where she studied with James Darling.In her creative work, she is interested in interactions, rules, gamifcation principles, and the transfer of models borrowed from various disciplines. Her affnity for early music and her search for fuidity and continuity are refected in her harmonic explorations, which touch on just intonation and historical temperaments. Her interest in interdisciplinary collaborations has led her to work with poets, visual artists, an herbalist, and dancers.As a composer, she has collaborated with a variety of ensembles, festivals, and organizations, including Ensemble Recherche, New Music Concerts, the Orchestre symphonique de l’Estuaire, Paramirabo, the Orchestre symphonique de Drummondville, and the Quasar Saxophone Quartet. She is the recipient of the Grand Prize in the 2022 SOCAN Young Canadian Composers competition and was awarded the Sandra and Alain Bouchard Foundation career development grant in 2024. Her music has been performed in Paris (France), Munich (Germany), Tinos (Greece), Toronto (Canada), Montréal, Domaine Forget de Charlevoix, and the festival Concerts aux Îles du Bic.

Louis-Michel Tougas is a composer, percussionist, and producer based in Montréal, Québec. His music has been heard across Canada, the United States, and Europe at international festivals such as Gaudeamus (Netherlands), Musica (France), and Éclat (Germany). He has collaborated with ensembles including Talea, Quatuor Bozzini, Quasar, the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester, Ensemble Ascolta, the Quatuor Mémoire, and Ensemble Éclat.Louis-Michel holds degrees in composition and music analysis from the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal and the Hochschule für Musik Stuttgart. He is currently completing a doctorate in composition at McGill University, where his research focuses on the cognition of polyrhythm and on timbre as a form-bearing dimension of music perception.He has given lectures in Canada, the United States, and Europe, and has written articles for journals such as Circuit, openworks, Revue musicale de l’OICRM, and Contemporary Music Review (forthcoming). He also teaches computer-assisted composition and 20th-century composition at McGill University.

Olivier St-Pierre is a Montréal-based composer, pianist, and organist specializing in contemporary music. Active as a pianist since childhood, he frst pursued studies in philosophy before returning to music, completing diplomas in instrumental composition and analysis at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal under the guidance of Nicolas Gilbert and Jimmie LeBlanc. Since 2019, he has served as the principal organist at theSanctuaire-du-Saint-Sacrement, where he curates a concert series dedicated to contemporary repertoire and new works for organ (Les concerts du Sanctuaire).His compositional approach draws inspiration from early music, grounded in polyphonic and combinatorial techniques while maintaining a decidedly experimental perspective. His music seeks to question the act of listening and to delve into the depths of sound, notably through the exploration of acoustic phenomena, microtonality, and polyrhythm. He has written for a wide variety of instrumental ensembles, both in Québec and across Canada, as well as abroad.