for accordeon & piano – 2019

I.- Quand le psittirostre zinzinule (ca. 9′)
II.- Novembre (in memoriam Jean-Claude Risset & Corinna L.) (ca. 6′)

Premiere: 30 Nov. 2019, Festival Rainy Days, Luxembourg, Anna-Maria Hoelscher: Acc.; Florian Hoelscher: Piano

 

Program note :
The one who, in this time of crisis of listening, where the visual prevails over the auditory (until the 18th century, the art of pure listening was also a secondary art), where even some composers are oriented, as a consequence, towards a conceptual art or towards the addition of multimedia and visual tools, continues to compose pure music may appear for some as a dinosaur.

I proudly claim this attitude, on the one hand because listening is, without my being able to change it, my favorite sense, my passion, my handicap. On the other hand, in these times of post-modern capitalism that seeks not freed producers but normalized consumers in order to better manipulate them, it is necessary to fight for one’s minority expertise and for the acceptance of one’s difference, one’s dissonance.

What interests me more particularly, as a composer, is to mislead the cognitive listening, beyond the simple gesture, to rely on paradoxes of the perception, as for example, in this work, pulsed rhythms in complex polymetries (first movement), creations and exchanges of unrecognizable sonorities between the two instruments (the use of little used registers, for example, in the first movement), or descending scales that one thinks one recognizes, but which are in fact not octaviating (second movement).

I like to assign my titles after I have composed. However, what does it mean to compose in these times of climate disruption and the decline of the anthropocene? The psittirostrum, disappeared, does not zinzinulate any more. Can the composer still compose? This cycle (two pieces are available, another movement should follow) is in a way a desenchanted chronicle (“chroniques déchantées“), where the artist cannot change the world but can bear witness to it.