Text by Frédéric Mitterrand from Love Letters in Somalia (Editions du regard, 1983)

Dedicated to Pascal Sauzy

Creation Musicora (Paris) 1996

Editions Henry Lemoine

Duration: ca. 9'

Writing for solo male voice is challenging in many ways ; few works of this genre exist : the " lourdeur " and the inertia of the male voice a priori unfavorable, make opt for the female voice, which is often lighter, more flexible and more virtuoso.

Yet the male voice can be very virtuoso, many works  past and present attest to this ; it has - because low - a great richness of timbre as well as great flexibility in the changes of range.

There remains this pitfall : clarity in speed ; but that is a matter of the throat, not of the impossibility of writing.

Frédéric Mitterrand's letter, of a melancholy character, conceals – because it evokes various situations – a multiplicity of feelings, of very opposed, even contradictory affects. This is in line with my concerns as a composer : to juxtapose very different musical situations in a short time ; the coherence of the form being ensured by a limited number of basic motifs subject to a great deal of variation and, on the contrary, by the return of elements that are almost unchanged. The form is like a continuous variation, a series of mutually appealing associations of ideas.

The richness of timbre is given here, not by an unconventional technique of the voice – on the contrary, all that is asked for is very traditional – but by an unusual juxtaposition of the various vocal processes.

However, beyond these stylistic elements, a constant remains : long very sustained sentences -sometimes to the limit of the breath- punctuated by the repetition of the two words_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b- 136bad5cf58d_: “ I want ”. This repetition acquires a profoundly dramatic meaning because the person who utters them is no longer in a position to want anything : they have been left and are crying in pain.

The music here plays with what is proper to it : give the other side of the thing with the thing itself ; hence a generalized phenomenon of opposition : high/low, smooth/ornate, strong/soft, mouth open/closed, long/short, stamped/de-stamped, chest voice/voice head, etc., thus conveying the ambivalence of the speaker's feelings.