A tribute to Henri Dutilleux

Commissioned by the Center Culturel André Malraux de Vandoeuvre (Scène Nationale) for the Quatuor Stanislas, as part of the centenary of the birth of Henri Dutilleux

Created on November 26, 2016 at the CCAM de Vandoeuvre

Duration : approx. 20'. In progress

Looking like " so french ", my sweetest choice is the first line of "O solitude, my sweetest choice!" by Henri Purcell on the eponymous poem by Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant.

For this reason, a poetic dimension linked to melancholy is underlying throughout this 3rd quartet and alludes to the silence that Dutilleux imposed on himself. This attitude has always appealed to me, so this subtitle echoes it. As much as withdrawal into oneself is often a condition, or at the very least a necessary moment in order to create, this solitude becomes terrible when it leads to silence. This silence finds a particular resonance in me as I am convinced that the Work of a life, although being the crucible of multiple influences and evolutions, can only be built in solitude, that is to say a self-to-self dialogue, where the most intimate associations can be fully realized.

When I was 17, my discovery of Metaboles by Henri Dutilleux opened me up to contemporary writing and its roots in current issues (here biology). This shock was decisive in my commitment to an art where research and invention would forever oppose the conventional. From the work of Dutilleux, I will have retained the formal coherence, the elegance, the purity of his style - French if ever there was one - so much art today seems to have become internationalized.

In a single and ample movement, my 3rd string quartet is constructed using multiple patterns of very differentiated characters. Two of them are borrowed references :

 - A quote from Purcell's 1st musical phrase (rhythms and pitches but also Morse code translation of the letters OS olitude )

 - A very short fragment borrowed from Mirror of space , the 2nd part of the quartet Thus the night of Henri Dutilleux

Although the genre does not exist as such in music, I could have called my quartet A musical self -portrait because one particularity of my writing is to give the very object in question to be heard. And what is at issue, following CPhE Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Schoenberg and certain symphonic poems, is that to write without pre-established patterns is to create - possibly by association of ideas (durchkomponiert) - a form that today we can qualify as post psychoanalytical (ie post Schoenbergian). Dutilleux, like Varèse, opened this path where, in some of their works, music is no longer the mirror of the creator's unconscious (or the projection of his inner world). In my writing, musical form and internal movements of the body (I make no difference between mind and body) are one and the same phenomenon underpinned by the vital energy which causes the Living to arise, construct and deconstruct. Work built of heterogeneous fragments in continual movement, mixing, etc., I like to speak of my writing as a spiral form where, among other things, contaminations, mutations, flows, exchanges are de facto characteristics of the Living. This is why I consider my works as living organisms, partly independent of myself, and having the ability to invert other organisms.

To listen is to be immersed in a sound flow made up of dynamics, tensions, suspension...

To listen is to perceive the sensitive poetics of a " plastique in motion ", of a constantly remodeled kinetic architecture, sometimes soft and poetic, tender and sensitive, sometimes brutal, brittle and exalted.