On a haiku by Yves Sarda

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Dedicated to Beja Tjeerdsma , artist/resident at the Maison-Atelier Theo van Doesburg from 2014 to 2016

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First performance on 09/10/2016 at the Maison-Atelier van Doesburg in Meudon (France)

Creation at the Voûtes - Frigos de Paris on 09/13/2016 by Nathalie Pannier, voice and Augustin Viard, waves.

Duration: ca'6' - Delatour Editions

Several poetic ideas are at the source of this work:

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- A unique “contemporary haiku” written by the translator and screenwriter Yves Sarda, a longtime friend: silence breathes its meaning sigh silence, where the constant return of the consonant S gave the title of the work.

- Esse, the verb to be in Latin, refers to the "trajectory" of this "ontological" haiku: "We are born from silence in a breath that is refined in sound, which becomes clearer and persists until it takes on meaning. and take root there. But the required tension, sooner or later untenable, dissolves into a sigh to return to the initial silence, which becomes final.” The musical form reproduces this arched form.

- The esse, in Celtic art, is the central figure of interlacing, whose particularity is to create complex shapes using simple figures.

- The place of the first audition: the house-workshop of the Dutch architect Theo van Doesburg in Meudon (France). Founder of the artistic movement and of the magazine - in which Piet Mondrian actively participated -, van Doesburg will have influenced as a theoretician the teaching of the Bauhaus. His conceptual reflections deeply marked the international art of the 20th century: "What I claim is the controllable form for painting, sculpture and architecture". His need for abstraction and simplification, his rejection of impressionism (similar to baroque) led him, through the intermediary of mathematics, to the elaboration of pure forms, in dynamic equilibrium and as if in expansion, light as in weightlessness.

- Finally, few works for voice and airwaves have been written. I attended the creation of the Triptych for voice and waves by Francis Bayer, a great academic, musicologist and composer with whom I had the chance to work at the Faculty of Vincennes. This one has become over time a dear friend who disappeared too soon. As a tribute, I wanted to evoke his work by finishing mine as he finishes his.

Musically, the simple figures, the counterpoint of the voice and the waves, reflect the refined forms of the De Stijl movement. “Only the pure aspect of the elements, in balanced proportions, can attenuate the tragedy in life and in art” (Piet Mondrian).