Noema

For alto saxophone and chamber orchestra (2019)

Impetus, dynamism, and dance... Noema could be the name of a muse, delicate and magical, represented in music by repeated changes of mood. Beyond that initial impression, the title encourages us to reflect on our relationship to perception.

A noema, in philosophy, means something that is perceived by thought, rather than by our senses (unlike a phenomenon). So how, then, does one organise listening and the music’s joy in movement through a logical temporal structure? Out of that kind of thinking, a trajectory develops, emerging from an initial impulse, that gradually transforms the sensual arabesques of the opening into beats and repetitive phrases leading on to the gaiety of a dance, underlain by sighs. Like life itself, which is made up of endless recurrences in a process of intensification and loss of impetus, the music comes back to those arabesques, then becomes a whirlwind before dying away with a dancing memory.

Noema was premiered at the International Adolphe Sax Contest at Dinant.

(Claude Ledoux)