et j’entendis des voix

About

It was mainly from visual art that I acquired the concept of the growth of the artist’s overall opus as a process of continually digging deeper, of refining an idea to its essence by gradually expelling everything that is extraneous to it and therefore unauthentic. In music, this process is exemplified by Anton Webern’s opus. At the same time, as the idea is polished, new and unexpected paths for exploration are sometimes revealed. This is the case in et j’entendis des voix for solo accordion, in which I adopted a formal approach that is somewhat different from the “event network” construction of most of my other works. The composition can be understood as having several strands, each of which is gradually elaborated and expanded in time. These strands are then braided together, so that there is a sequence of different strands coming to the fore, but always in a later phase of metamorphosis. The overall formal design is rounded off with a sequence of sustained chords whose ebb and flow is largely determined by the acoustic properties of the instrument itself.