Commissioned by the ensemble Le Concert Impromptu

Created on March 22 and 23, 1997 at the Opéra National de Lyon during the Festival Musiques en Scène.

Editions Lemoine. Duration: approx. 10'30

Your Rilke  : the signature of the poet Rainer-Maria Rilke of course, at the bottom of the many letters addressed to the women he loved.

To write this work, I retained from my readings letters, poems and prose texts by Rilke as well as a certain number of motifs, themes or processes specific to his writing.

I particularly endeavored to understand how he heard the music, what touched him, went in the direction of his concerns and poetic images and forced myself to write the "ideal" music which could have been his if he had been composer. I behaved in relation to his writings no differently than he did: "he only grasped, intuitively, certain aspects of his encounters with books, works of art, landscapes and, in to a certain extent, the beings? He had only welcomed, but passionately, what revealed, specified certain essential movements of his own nature. He had found these correspondences which strengthened him, he always threatened by doubt, which filled him with joy and gratitude by confirming him in his singularity. At least as much as he made himself, in a spontaneous mixture of activity and passivity, Rilke let himself be done, allowed himself to be formed by what suited the best of himself, stubbornly refusing what would have distorted. »

"To describe his poems, one has recourse to two opposing categories of images:

• those that speak of immobility, contemplation, welcome, slow maturation (the tree, the fruit, the monk in his cell, etc.)

• those that speak of momentum, movement, passage (the bird, the wind, the pilgrim…)”

We then find in his listening to music, these two opposing categories:

• silence (broken or enveloping), distance, silence, interior, murmur, peace, distant…

• the music rises like a city (walls, ramparts, towers, turrets), rhythmic rage, surge, storm, tempest, vociferations, transports of joy...

To this rather architectural, spatial conception which is already "music", we should add:

• on the one hand, what “song” is for Rilke: to sing is to be, who sings breathes, breathing as the primary form between the inside and the outside, song coming from the depths of being, song = pure presence, breath around nothing, song converts time into space

• on the other hand, the idea that the reflected world (of the mirror, of the water, that of the angels, of the sky) is perhaps more real than reality

Rilke therefore chooses themes that make it possible to think of normally exclusive categories (inside/outside, life/death, etc.) as complementary and forming by inversion a totality, the ambivalence of poetic language allowing it.

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We find the application of this idea of reflections (more or less deformed) in the very form of my work where, at 2/3 of it, several passages are repeats - by contrary and/or retrograde movements, in an order different chronology - of passages from the first part of the work.

What is still topical in Rilke is the notion of correspondence: “this one was a wanderer, but his life was in reality subject to less visible but stronger laws; in this life where Rilke broke one by one all the bonds which were not essential to him in order to restore it relentlessly at the cost of efforts often cruel for others and painful for him, in the constellation of pure relationships, in this life at bottom very consistent. »

The resulting music has a particularity that is a constant in my writing and meets Rilke's concerns: it is made up of multiple more or less related or contradictory motifs, of the same importance, organically linked together, in the same form, by a network of almost rhizomatic correspondences, where each motif has meaning only in its relationship with the others. This music is characterized by its absence of center, and the process of “mirror” reinforces all the more this state of a non-reference to a primordial reason from which all the work would come. Reading or listening to a passage is therefore considerably enriched by listening to (or knowing) the other moments when it reappears in a slightly modified form, thus weaving the network that extends to the whole work. ? Listening is about making matches where the variations and combinations of patterns are less important than when and how they appear.

In order to reflect the precision, the delicacy, the refinement, the preciousness (sometimes at the limit of sentimentality) of Rilke's language, I took the opposite side: rather than writing a refined, precious music, with rare sonorities , researched and pedantic, I took the side of simplicity, "pure" sounds and developed an instrumental game of great lightness, thus creating an airy music, a kind of counterpoint in space, hoping to reach - to use the words of Rilke himself - the grace, the transparency that more tense music would ignore.

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NB: the quotes are taken from: RILKE by Philippe Jaccottet, editions du threshold