for flute, Bb clarinet / Bb bass clarinette, violin, cello and piano
(to the members of the Fractals Ensemble)
Erotique-Lancinante
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano ( 2018 - 25’)
Initially, a haunting [lancinante] sentence that resonates in my memory, a quote from André Breton's L'Amour Fou : « la beauté convulsive sera érotique-voilée, explosante-fixe, magique-circonstancielle, ou ne sera pas / the convulsive beauty will be erotic-veiled, explosive-fixed, magical-circumstantial, or will not be ».
Beautiful words, almost incantatory, that make me definitely dream. But where Breton (later Boulez) definitively falls back on oppositions, I am moved by the necessity of a "between terms". Eroticism is elusive. Why freezing it in categories, as it flies at the whim of desires ? With a sligfht movement of thought, he becomes a dancing caress ; furthermore, an impulse of life and creation. From then on, my music reveals the trace of books by the French philosopher François Jullien. No definitive categories, but a gap between two proposals in which the whispered world can finally fit. Between Inspire and Expire. Between « Me and the other » (maybe also between « me and myself »). Becoming the space between the two terms, an essential procedure in my music, creating points « in Between » between different musical materials.
Three movements punctuate this piece, most often with a great sweetness :
- Regarde-moi… (Look at me...)
- Dis-moi… (Tell me …)
- Erotique… (Erotic…)
In these movements, the flute plays a central role ; a kind of solist, container of desires like the « Charmeuse de serpent » by Le Douanier Rousseau, fantastic painting considered as a poetic impulse to my work. Imaginary passions, unbridled colours, games of shadows and light. Rousseau imagined his creature in a dream-poem :
« Yadwigha in a beautiful dream
Falling asleep slowly
Heard the sounds of a musette… »
I used that visual and poetic landscape as a compositional form, a « in Between » where the many passions can fit in.
The Piece was premiered by its dedicatee (the Fractales Ensemble) at the occasion fo the ReMusic Festival, Saint-Petersburg, May 2018.
Erotique-Lancinante got the financial support from the Contemporary music office / Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles.