Commissioned by the Gentilly Conservatory

Created on December 18, 1983 at the St Saturnin church in Gentilly by the teachers of the conservatory under the direction of the composer

Duration: 7' (unfinished work of 4'30).

Interview with Bernard de Vienne (December 1983 program)

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Does the small orchestra used look interesting to you ?

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• Yes, a lot because in this piece I have set myself the goal of never really making a " pur " sound heard but to continually color it either by a precise mode of play (breath, voice, mixed instrument, etc…), either by mixing between instruments, or by mutation from one instrument to another, or by other more or less elaborate processing modes. This formation lends itself particularly well to it : the wind instruments have great flexibility as far as playing modes are concerned, the percussions are an inexhaustible mine of sounds of all kinds and the piano, melodic and percussion instrument at the same time, serves as a link between these 2 sound layers.

The score you show me is practically unreadable for a non-professional musician or even one not accustomed to contemporary music !

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• Indeed, as I just said, the texture is very detailed, which makes the score particularly heavy but not unreadable. Approaching it in its entirety is therefore slower than when it comes to any more classical work assimilated for a long time. This is a normal phenomenon which concerns the majority of contemporary works which are very often of an ever-increasing complexity, due to the integration and overcoming of all past achievements. Be that as it may, the means (sophisticated writing) should not be confused with the ends : for the amateur as for the professional it is not the quantity of ink in the cm2 or the off-putting side of a writing – which after all escapes the beginner for lack of training – what matters is the hearing first of all, the how and the why only coming later.

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And this work, what can we say about it ?

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• Above all, that it is unfinished tonight. You will hear about half, or 4'30. I didn't have time to finish it and this preview suits me perfectly : as the 2nd part of the work is a kind of deconstruction of the 1st, this work with the musicians is excellent because it will allow me to eliminate a lot of “ false tracks ” which inevitably arise. The title The Den of Sleep is taken from James Joyce's novel Ulysses . In no case did I set the book to music. The similarity with this one is the number of sound events per second which weave a sufficiently dense frame so that an individual sound is not heard in itself but melted into a mass. Like Joyce for whom there were never enough situations and details at the same time, I tried to blur the listening in such a way that there are several levels of listening. For example, there are multiple overlapping tempi assigned to each instrument ; you can try to fixate on one and listen to the others based on it, but that's not really the point. All modalities are possible until trying to perceive all the details at the same time ! If I had an image to give, I would use this one : you are an observer located in space, you observe the earth, you perceive activities of all kinds on its surface, you are more particularly attracted to a city – Dublin for example – in this city a human group or a specific individual catches your attention, then everything becomes indistinct again completely except to be engulfed in it again a little later. This swarming, which is the set of human relationships in all its thickness, Joyce calls it " the den of sleep ", i.e. say a generalized individual and collective drowsiness, an eternal return of situations that are always similar, although displaced in time and space (Joyce gives the image of the spiral). To escape this situation where all outbursts of voice are banished, Joyce, Irish, was a voluntary exile, not only from his country, but also literally to be able to shout, the artistic task par excellence.

Personal comment from 2010

This work already contains all my themes: multiplicity of timbres, ways of doing things, idea of a total work, work in progress, maximum proliferation, poetic image of wave movement, form like a mass from which emerges for a moment what will fall the next moment (Rodin : La porte de l'enfer ), the tampura of Indian music : place where sounds are born and die, spiral form, mixture, emergence, l erasure, traces, my work on polyphony, surpassing oneself at the instrumental level, mixed tenderness and violence, mirrors, fragments, mosaics, poetry of tiny detail, heterogeneous imaginary museum, reflection on "_cc781905-5cde-3194 -bb3b-136bad5cf58d_active listening ”, on artistic commitment and determinism in creation…

Unfinished but immensely important work where I developed the notion of " game mode melody " like the "_cc781905-5cde-3194-bb3b -136bad5cf58d_timbre melody ” by Schoenberg. Highly influenced by the work of Luciano Berio and Brian Ferneyhough, this paradigm of " playmode melody " is in fact, with the passing of time, the continuation “ cellules generatrices ” by Carlos Alsina even before I knew his music and worked with him.

The form and project of this work was in the spirit of Il Suono  : starting from nothing and gradually enriching the sound texture by proliferation and accumulation in a kind of gigantic wave movement (for ebb and flow). Arrived at its climax, this gigantic wave was to fall in a time a little shorter than its rise.

This " polyphony of instrumental playing modes " was a way of creating a multiplicity of timbres and textures (i.e. combinations of parameters of the sound) inside this moving mass. In this type of writing, the overall listening is more important than that of the detail (like Atmosphere by Ligeti for example).