Educational version (1981)

Pedagogical commission from the Gentilly Conservatory for 8 to 16 flutes - Creation in June 1981.

Version for 2 flautists and reinjection tape (1983/84) - Premiered on May 15, 1984 at the Church of St Saturnin in Gentilly by Jacques Le Trocquer and Bernard de Vienne, then recorded and broadcast by Radio France on July 12, 1984

Version for 2, 3, 4 flutes and tape in reinjection or ensemble of flutes (1984 - revision August 2006 for the ensemble le trio d'argent (August 2006))

Duration of all versions: from 16' (minimum duration) to 1 hour.

Unedited (contact the composer).

Text of the 1984 version

Il suono (sound) is a kind of sound tapestry whose chain is made up of a single chord that more or less masks all the various playing modes, multiple patterns of sonic threads of various colors and qualities (the weft ).

Listening would now mean looking at this slow and patient work of weaving and following in the very instant, one after the other, the choice of each of the sonic threads which form the tapestry as a whole over time. Indeed, no order being imposed, the instrumentalists are constantly led, by ear, to choose with circumspection which sound - and therefore which mode of play - to play at such and such a precise moment, according to the moment passed, present and future.

The process of reinjection, a sort of echo deferred in time, created by the repetition of patterns played previously, a continuous sound depth in which all the sounds merge. It constitutes by the same token the common background where all the motifs that are detached from it are born and die.

Learning music

With regard to the initial version for students, a reflection on the nature of sound is still topical and it will always be in their interest, during their learning, to deepen their knowledge of their instrument through common practices in improvisation often from other cultures.

These will thus enrich their ways of playing and will give a richer image of the multiple expressive possibilities of the flute, thus developing a whole range of expressive registers close to noise, from " son sale_cc781905-5cde- 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_”, untempered sounds, etc. In addition, this work, which can be stylistically qualified as spectral music and improvisation, does not require any virtuosity and can be approached by a student from the start of cycle 2. In addition, it allows the development of mutual listening in a group.

2009 commentary

The first version of this work dates from March 1981 and was premiered in June of the same year. This commission from the Gentilly Conservatory, directed at the time by flautist Jacques Le Trocquer, was intended for my entire flute class. It was the time of the end of my studies at the faculty of Vincennes and of my entire activity as a professional flautist, among others within the ensemble Musique Vivante directed by Diego Masson, the son of the painter André Masson. Musically, this early work owes a lot to the various currents that ran through and agitated the musical world : music was spoken of as a branch of scientific research and, on the contrary, of self-management and total improvisation (John Cage among others).

This work is part of this post-sixties spirit, not devoid of a pseudo mysticism. It reflects my discovery of improvised music (where the musical gesture was essential) that I practiced myself as well as non-European music (Indian, among others with flautist Hariprasad Chaurasia) and a different way of listening . Born in Tunisia, my knowledge of North African music gave me a taste for non-European cultures and music as well as a passion for finding unusual sounds that irrigate all my musical writing to this day.

Il suono is the heir to the vocal research of Luciano Berio, of Stimmung and Adieu de Stockhausen, of the various works of Scelsi and his research on timbre such as the famous ones ( Quattro Pezzi su una nota sola ). It is also related to music electroacoustics and research on the treatment of the sound phenomenon as carried out at the GRM then directed by Pierre Schaeffer ( Treatise on musical objects ).The dominant theoretical paradigm -but in the final phase- was integral serialization where the sound was broken down into parameters (attacks, duration, decay, timbre, intensity, pitch, thickness, density, mass, granulation, etc.) such as Boulez was able to theorize in his book Thinking Music Today. Olivier Messiaen's intensity, Karlheinz Stockhausen put this way of writing into practice in his famous Klavierstücke XI for solo piano or Zeitmass for wind quintet (to name 2 emblematic works). atic) and Brian Ferneyhough in an extreme way in Cassandra's Dream Song and Unity Capsule for solo flute.

1981 was also the year of my master's degree at the Faculty of Vincennes, a perfectly libertarian place if there ever was one, and of the writing of my dissertation, the subject of which, by provocation, should have come from the Sorbonne and not from this Faculty... The subject, now banal, was less so at the time : Evolution of the notion of polyphony between antiquity and the Middle Ages. He raised the question of whether the West had really invented polyphonic music. Only a few musicologists and ethnomusicologists such as André Schaeffner ( Writings of musicology and other fantasies - Éditions Le Sycomore) or… the writer André Gide during his trip to the Congo, had understood, outside of the ambient Eurocentrism, standard of all cultures, that the West had not invented polyphony, but that this way of practicing was the basis of the majority of musical expressions in the world, even if the music is 3194-bb3b-136bad5cf58d_”. Moreover, we know today that the first Western polyphonies (regardless of the regions of Europe) only wrote what had been practiced with several distinct but simultaneous voices for a long time. Our learned Western culture, under the influence of Christian thought, has in fact codified, planned and developed a musical practice that already has several voices by inventing a way of writing it. Moreover, the very word polyphony was only introduced into the musical vocabulary in the 2nd half of the 19th century by…Gustav Mahler, thus theoretically justifying his way of composing (for example the 1st movement of the 4th symphony). This word had the fortune that we know today !

Il suono echoes this state of mind which - back in history - is resurfacing today. For example, the avant-garde music of the 60s/70s mixed cultures : melting pot and other mixed music was the avant-garde music with the watchwords of the time . If one wants since the year 2000 to write a " music current or avant-garde ", it is unthinkable to make music that is not_cc781905-5cde culturally and stylistically_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b-136_bad5cf58d; even techno music found in Pierre Henry a spiritual father and founder! The return of pressure or rock groups…, more or less in self-management, updates a spirit of guerrilla warfare in the face of globalization, the avatar of capitalism at the time.

Although my writing today no longer has much to do with Il suono, the same state of mind animates it in the taste for the tiniest detail, in the abundance of sound, in the luxuriance of timbres and the precision of my writing down to the smallest detail of the various sound parameters.