Les ruptures d’Icare L.
First String quartet (1993)
1. Avec une tendresse infinie
2. Lent et désespéré
3. Paisible, mais réflexif
4. Avec une tendresse feinte
This work was written in 1993 for the Gong Quartet who commissioned it and to whom it is dedicated. Its composition enabled me to put into practice some thoughts that had come to me on the occasion of a trip to Northern India that I had undertaken the previous year. These were, how to organise a musical discourse that is articulated around simple material that evolves through phases of more or less complex distortion. The study of Indian ornamentation and its varied uses were to furnish the solution. Integrated and ‘metabolised’ through the filter of my own musical sensitivity, it wove its web throughout a dialectic in perpetual motion between harmonic and inharmonic thought. In this work, the interaction between vertical phenomena and ornamentation of the musical material is such that it becomes impossible to force the discourse into the limits of development. Given this, the only way to avoid any ‘slippage’ that would have led the listener into the domains of anarchy or crassness, was to declare a ‘state of rupture’ at a critical moment in each of the first three movements. As for the fourth and last part, it presents a particular solution to the ear, offering an ultimate state of distortion of the tone-colour and once and for all escaping from the sounds of the string quartet in the guise of metaphorical freedom.