Courbes d’étoiles VI
for solo piano (7 min.)
from the cycle Courbes d'Etoiles I - VI
Work composed for my wife, the Japanese pianist Nao Momitani, on the occasion of her recital "Eastern Piano, at the borders of sound, water, light and sword" given in the framework of Ars Musica festival 2012. Here, Japan appears as a watermark, for me and the people who knows this wonderful country, its iridescence and its paradoxes. Where the madness of immeasurable desires of consumption rhymes with exegesis of ancient wisdom. Beyond the Torii (front door) of the temple, the time stops, leaving only the pure vibration invading us. Spiral of mind and soul that joins the transcendent cosmic, connecting our humanity to the cosmos in which we were born. Musical moment therefore conceived as an initiatory journey, poetic movement that offers a valuable sharing and a confluence between East and West. In this space a refined poetry lifts the veil. It calls for that symbolic instrument of the Japanese culture: the Bell. Ritual object par excellence. Then, remains the desire to go back to the stars whose slow dances are carrying messages from these bells (represented by the inharmonicity in the score - with the minor third as predominant interval) addressed to the gently cosmic spirits. Dances of the stars, again, which are transforming our being forever in its most subtle materiality (represented by forms of harmonicity - with perfect triads within the harmony), a dialectic that establishes the same issue for this sixth Courbes d'étoiles, designed as a soft and slow, nostalgic but colorful and bright travel... Also as an damped echo of a tribute to the victims of that Japanese tragedy of March 2011, whose souls came across the stars of our cosmic Unity.
The work was premiered in March 18, 2012, by its dedicatee pianist, Nao Momitani, at the occasion of the Japanese Days of Ars Musica Festival 2012.