Programme note

In Henri MICHAUX’s magically enigmatic text, speech becomes a breath, an incantation. The text seems surrounded by a halo, an immaterial coil, a dreamed space (or a passageway between life and death) where the boundaries of the real body disappear, revealing another field of consciousness, beyond time, beyond space, beyond matter.

The treatment of the instrumental texture is extremely fluctuating (a back and forth movement between great density and scarceness). The registers are very mobile (swinging between high and low pitches, stretching, with a distortion of the musical fabric around a constant but tenuous thread, a precarious balance point, always likely to be torn). The harmony derived from four spectra of a Chinese tam-tam played with different drum sticks, is rich in resonance and subjected to constant micro-oscillations (a superimposition of variable scales derived from the spectral material).

The voice is used to reveal the fragmented body of the text (words falling apart, the voice splitting in multiple, scattered voices). The modes of vocal expression are clearly different, according to the three levels of speech present in the text.

Evolving sound configurations are developed and fade away in a continual disruption of the musical matter (dots, lines, masses) for ever inchoate but showing crystallization points. The temporal articulations of the musical sequences undergo breaks, surges, sudden backward movements.

All these elements as well as the use of electronics (alteration of the identity of the instrumental timbres with various computer treatments, merging of instrumental and electronic timbres, a stretching of time, a reverberated space) work together to conjure up what is below the text in a space that eludes and recreates itself at every moment.

Clara Maïda, May 2000