Ellipsen

Composer's note:

The trio 'Ellipsen', for clarinet, violin and piano, is based on a cycle of poems by Roland Jooris, a Flemish poet born in Wetteren in 1936. Attracted by Jooris's approach, which transposes into his works the impressions felt in front of plastic art objects, I tried to (re)translate into musical expression what I was evoked by reading this astonishing work. In agreement with the poet, I borrowed the titles of the six poems from the cycle that I had selected for each of the six musical movements. The size of each of them varies, which helps to translate the contrasts between each poem :

OVAAL                clarinette solo

EI                         duo violon piano

SAENREDAM      trio

FAGOT                duo clarinette piano

ETUDE                violon solo

IMPROMPTU      trio

 It is not, however, a musical setting of the text: "Ellipsen" can be listened to as an autonomous work, as pure music, but the hearing of the music combined with the reading of the poems makes the connection between the two modes of artistic expression explicit.

 "Ellipsen" is composed on an original scale resulting from the alignment of harmonic sounds: it uses a limited number of tempered sounds, but also three non-tempered sounds, played only by the violin and clarinet. The piano therefore does not require any special tuning, and the non-temperate sounds played by the two melodic instruments create relationships of 1/4, 3/4 and 7/6 tone. The purpose of using this "micro-tonality" is to ask musicians to get as close as possible to the scale of harmonic sounds generated by the laws of acoustics and to exploit the phenomena of natural resonance. In this respect, I am tempted to make a connection with Jooris' aesthetics, described by critics in Flanders as 'nieuw-realist', and with his desire to explore the tense relations between poetry and reality, reality and plastic art, plastic art and poetry.