Composer's note:
At the origin of the project for this piece was the decision to collect a collection of sounds from the Japanese cultural heritage. It is in this context that my friend Jean-Philippe Merckaert, resident in Japan for several years and interpreter of my organ works, sent me the recording of the main temple bell from Nikkō, captured during the ceremony celebrating the New Year. Indeed, in the land of the rising sun, following a centuries-old tradition, all the temple bells resound to announce the New Year.
The other sounds come from collections of traditional music or from my own travels in Japan, such as the sound of the bell of Shōrō (bell tower at the entrance of a Buddhist enclosure) and that of Bonshō (main bell) of Koyasan.
The composition ends with the echo of a page that I had initially dedicated to the organ, now transformed into a violin duet and shō (mouth organ), the sounds of the latter having been recomposed thanks to the tools offered by electronics. This page is an evocation of the homage that the poet Buson paid to his deceased colleague Bashō in a lyrical haiku proclaiming that "without him from now on, the year will have no end".
The piece is thus a succession of dives into these "sonances", so singular, and linked together by the process of "fade in and out":
1 - Nikkō
2 - Hase-dera
3 - Shōrō
4 - Bonshō
5 - Bashō satte