Irvine Arditti: extreme violinist - Telegraph Arditti laughs at the memory. He's a short tousle-haired figure, with exactly the right physique for a violinist - short and solid, with powerful fingers, almost no neck, a general air of contained power. He's made a speciality of the most technically taxing form of contemporary violin music, sometimes as a soloist, sometimes as a leader of the string quartet he founded in the early 1970s. To see Arditti in full flood, bow bouncing, left hand flying in a blur of movement over the fingerboard, is to be left amazed that this humble wooden box can produce such strange sounds. Arditti's approach to the violin is fascinating, but there seems something perverse about it. He plays an instrument that over the centuries has been given some of the most glorious melodies in all music. Why turn it into a midget electronic synthesizer, with gut strings instead of micro-chips? It turns out the motivation is partly an old-fashioned love of virtuosity. "I love the idea of going to the limit of what you can do," he says. These composers often ask you to do strange things like play microtones, or play on the body of the instrument, but with the music I and my quartet play it's not just a question of fast finger-work. It's all to do with getting inside a living composer's mind. You see, with the music we play there is no performing tradition. We have to create it, we have to turn these very odd-looking marks into music which has never been heard before. We move downstairs from Arditti's cluttered study, and settle at the table in his cosy kitchen. As he brews up some tea I ask Arditti about his exotic-sounding name. My ancestry is quite colourful, but I'm not. My parents were born in England, but my father traced his family back to 15th Spanish Jews, who moved to England via Izmir, and my mother's family are Russian Jews from Minsk. Like so many stories told by remarkable musicians, Arditti's began with a revelatory experience. He'd started to learn the violin at age nine, and loved music, but he was stifled by the musical culture at home. My parents were quite musical, and they used to play a kind of gypsy music at home, which I really hated. Looking back I can see I was searching for something. Three years later he found it, when his mother took him to the English Bach Festival. That was a revelation. I met Messiaen and Xenakis, and I heard their incredible music which really opened doors for me. I don't know why I was so different to the other boys, I often say my mother must have dropped me on my head when I was very small! All this reveals that stubborn streak that refused to take no for an answer from Stockhausen. At 13 Arditti made a beeline for that Mecca of avant-garde music, the Darmstadt summer school. He entered the Royal Academy of Music at 16, and before he left five years later he founded the string quartet he still leads today. It was just an enjoyable side-line at first, but the BBC started to broadcast our concerts, we made some LPs, and word got round that we were really serious about just playing new music and nothing else. Composers started to approach us, instead of us approaching them. Almost forty years on the quartet is still going strong. It's commissioned hundreds of composers, and has only one rival, the Kronos Quartet, which plays a much more mellifluous form of new music. Has Arditti any regrets about spending so much time on music many people regard as incomprehensible? Not at all, I've loved the process of revealing a composer's vision to the world, and still do. I'm not really a religious person, but I really do think I was put on this earth to do this particular job. Irvine Arditti plays Cage's Freeman Etudes at the Huddersfield Festival of Contemporary Music on 18 November. The Arditti Quartet plays there on 20 November 01484 430528 www.hcmf.co.uk