About the works of Fabien Lévy, by Joël-Marie Fauquet, Director of Research in musicology, CNRS (febr. 2004).

Fabien Lévy was born on 11 December 1968. One might say that he approached music in a "hands-on" manner, with the piano as the key that unlocked the realm of classical music, and later jazz, to him. To this day, he continues to enjoy playing an instrument and to derive great pleasure from the production of musical sounds - an indispensable component of his musical practice. A mathematics and economics graduate (Master from ENSAE and from the ENS-ULM), he embarked on a scientific career which he interrupted in 1994 to dedicate himself to his first love: composition (he started composing at age 7). At the Paris Conservatoire Supérieur, he studied music analysis with Michaël Levinas, orchestration with Marc-André Dalbavie and composition with Gérard Grisey whose influence proved decisive. He also attended Gilles Léothaud's lectures on ethnomusicology. Fabien Lévy acknowledges every influence without being subservient to any of them. A part-time lecturer at the Sorbonne, he was also artistic director of the IRCAM Studio On Line project before being appointed pedagogical adviser in that same institute. A laureate of Fondation Singer-Polignac, he spent a year in residence in Berlin (DAAD's Berliner Künstlerprogramm, 2001), and another year at the Villa Medicis in Rome (2003). His music is nurtured on a mature theoretical reflection which, far from being constraining, acts as a liberating catharsis. He was awarded the 2004 Ernst von Siemens Foundation Prize, one of the major German awards for young composers.

In many ways, Fabien Lévy's art perfectly illustrates the concept of music as an object of thought caught in the midst of the powerful contradiction between expression and non-conceptualization. Using paradox as a variable of music is one of his strong points. Yet the point of that game of esthetics is to constantly elude that which imposes itself to the listener on a sonic and formal level. The piece conceals the means it thrives on as it goes along and imposes itself to the listener quite independently from any reference to its underlying technical and theoretical parameters.

Fabien Lévy calls on the various modalities of instrumental playing. Each piece is a new imaginative poetic play on timbre. Sound is a compositional means and so is the paradoxical concern about the relation between global perspective and details. As with any music moved by the sole necessity of transfigurating its object, Fabien Lévy's makes us face the evidence: the "musical discourse" can only be a transitory semantics between the fickle transience inherent to sound and the resounding depth of words. Free of all illustrative context and literary reference, this music expresses nothing but itself, and it would be vain to try and explain the 'meaning' of a piece except through analogies of a perceptive order.

Thus, to characterize certain aspects of the sound of one of his densest pieces, Hérédo-Ribotes for principal viola and 51 orchestral musicians, all of them playing as soloists, the composer speaks of a crackling, as of a substance that is not polished, tinted, enveloping. The value of the inductive sensation of the essence of music is reintroduced in every sense of the word. The listener is no longer subjected to a "discourse" in its traditional meaning, but is guided toward his own imaginary choices: he is free to concentrate on the detail or the ensemble, to invent his own path through the work, according to the spatialized sound events that follow one another as if resulting from a calculation that renders them unforeseeable.  

If the aleatoric element intervenes in the composer's compositional process, then primarily as a perceptive phenomenon. Indeed, for Fabien Lévy, an ultra-determinist who prescribes even the tiniest of nuances, the aleatoric parameter is a matter of reception, not one of production. Each work stands as a solution to a new sound problem that calls upon hitherto unknown instrumental combinations to outwit the stratagems of complexity, often with a great economy of means.

In this composer's universe, the saxophone is a privileged instrument, prized for the great suppleness of its timbre and the broad spectrum of sonorities that it offers. It has inspired works as different as Où niche l'hibou, seven instructional pieces for alto saxophone destined for the young student and his teacher (pieces that also exist in a version for two flutes, and for two clarinets), and which are remarkable for their playful imaginativeness; L'air d'ailleurs - Bicinium, a work for alto saxophone and electronic apparatus; Durch, in memoriam G. Grisey for saxophone quartet, whose title, evoking a simultaneity of procedures, alludes to the three meanings of the word that informs the work: the topical meaning "through," the instrumental meaning "by means of" and the temporal meaning "during." These multiple meanings also pervade the sound level of the word "Durch": from the hard sound of the "Du" to the infinitesimal respiration of "rch" used to evoke Grisey's death. In the composer's own words, the work is "a mosaic that trembles." Each saxophone subdivides itself into a certain number of elementary "virtual" instruments, each of which is played by several saxophones that blend together to form this concept of a trembling, vibrating mosaic.  

Another aspect of the composer's highly personal poetics of sound can be seen in Les deux ampoules d'un sablier peu à peu se comprennent for amplified solo harp, a work that also employs a technique of transparametrical musical inflections. Like a collection of shimmering little chimes, the harp reduces itself into a great number of elementary virtual instruments (each of which corresponds in general to one string), whereby the whole fuses together and gives rise to these inflections. The listener has the impression that something is happening, but cannot find an analytical explanation for this.

Risâla fî-l-hob wa fî 'ilm al-handasa [Small tratise of love and geometry], for flute, clarinet, euphonium, violin and cello plays on a totally different register. It draws its inspiration from the fine polyphonic texture of the muquarnas, (which is also, incidentally, the title of the first movement). The word designates the grotto-like ceilings at the Alhambra (Grenada, Spain). The Arabic title of the second movement: Murassa, refers to something that is "enameled, set, inlaid, sequined, etc." Both metaphorical titles reflect the composer's dual approach to music. As in several other pieces, Fabien Lévy brings in the notion of timbre diffraction and applies it as much as possible to sound and structure. 

If Fabien Lévy's oeuvre immediately captivates the listener through the particular intensity which its inventiveness endows it with, aesthetically it occupies a unique position. At the opposite end of the continuum of spectral music, it favors the technique of chiseling by incessantly thwarting the ruses of formalism.