« Mensagem Ao Mar »
Piano Trio (2009) - 20 '
I. Tempo di bossa nova
II. Marejados - esolarada - apaixonada (appasionata)
Message to the sea. Starting with the message "addressed" to the sea. Also, messages written on a slip of paper, whispers of human passions enclosed in a bottle, thrown into the sea so that they will be transmited to someone at the end of the world. Perhaps from Brazil to Europe and vice versa ?
Indeed, a score written after my second visit Brazil. I was invited successively in summer 2008 and 2009 to teach composition and analysis at the Universities of Campinas and Sao Paulo. The aim of these classes is to offer a reflection on the relationship between popular and/or folk music with the so-called "learned" style. Therefore this piece echoes the many discussions I have had with some passionate students about that topic.
Then, two movements based on a common project organized around the concept of revelation. Especially, that of musical expression originated in the early twenty-first century. To achieve this, the music takes its source in noisy fragments that can remind us of some human sounds - maybe the so-called whispers of human passions (noisy sounds with the bow on the wood or on the strings of the violin and cello, "toc-toc"on the wood of a strange piano, weird sounds from a string of that same piano, played with a tissue). Noisy sounds periodically born, mixed with some melodic fragments. And to make it better, all of that emerges from distant snatches of a Brazilian popular song "Chega de Saudade" ("saudades" - a kind of nostalgia) by Tom Jobim. The whole movement is built strictly on a (rhytmic and harmonic) "pattern" from that bossa nova which will also be revealed at certain bars of the score. As the fragments are revealed, the expressivity of these "objects" creates progressively a need for a second movement.
About the latter, structural work to attend another revelation - revelation of expressive qualities. From the "marejados" - a term impossible to translate into English, refering to a kind of human wave, as well as movements of tears (maybe an echo of my Third Quartet Les Larmes d'un Ange (Tears of an angel) ?) - until the "ensolarada" (a musical sunshine revealed by some harmonic fields détermined by spectrality), to finally blossom into an "appassionata", intense with its long notes spread over the exuberant virtuoso and jubilant piano.
Narrative music (not in the literal sense of the word, but the idea of a narration born from the relation of the musical events); expressive music emerging from the meeting of different cultures on our earth. Here, the confluence between South-American music and Western composition, a constant in my music production.
Mesagem Ao Mar is dedicated to Julia Tygel, a Brazilian composer and ethnomusicologist, actively involved in the archiving program of the musical heritage of the Indians Timbira. She made me discover so many wonderful Brazilian musics. Thanks to her. She shares this dedication with the members of the Trio Talweg who premiered this work in September 2009 at the Festival Emergence - Brussels.
Claude LEDOUX.