Lettre inachevée (1997) (Urbana 3)

For vibraphone

It is a complementary work of Claustrum, for percussion and fixed sounds.

Éditions Lemoine.

Focused on a single instrument, the piece reflects a partly absent atmosphere: the sign (lyric or letter) that is still to be completed. It is as if the first stroke of the drawing was interrupted. The veil which covers the remaining part subjects us to hearing the silence, the incipient sound of the harmonic fiction. This lie of the land makes us be inclined to a hearing which moves away from the traditionally discursive notion. 

Another lyric, another letter, left unfinished, forming a link at each side of the atlantic with my friend and poet Charlie Feiling, who died prematurely in July 97.

It could be said that as poetic nature  what is left unfinished defines us. The opening that is born from an unfinished work, a never-published book, a painting which has to be redone, a sketch…

Every work is, somehow, unfinished. Time, which imposes its own laws in particular to musicians−, arranges and organizes us in fixed points which frame what is by indefinable by excellence.

Because of its writing, voluble and filled with harmonic traps, this piece seems free, almost rhapsodic. The different junctions and harmonic layers, here, are tributary to enharmonic −a common note is the link between different chords or colours.

Form is lead in such a way that we seem to be going through a perceptive tunnel. The crystallization in shapes and tangible chords seems to reveal to us the remaining part, which, when revealed, quickly fades away −like in those sand notebooks in which a drawing erased the one that precedes it. In this context, in which every new shape is the first, suddenly erased, the form is given by the trajectory. The erosion of time takes the sign back to its archeological relief.

 


Lettre inachevée


[ Urbana Cycle ]
[ Solo instrument / with or without electronics ]