Motel ∞ is scored for flute, clarinet, percussions, violin and piano and was composed for the musicians of ERGO Projects during the year 2000. It was premiered at the Glenn Gould Studio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Toronto) in the Fall of 2000.
It was during a Mathematical Analysis class I was following at the Université du Québec à Montréal that professor J. Labelle used the metaphor of an infinite motel to illustrate the construction of unbounded sets such as the sets of natural numbers, relative numbers, fractional numbers and so on. The idea was that the host owning this motel with an infinite number of rooms had to host a mathematical congress with an infinite number of participants. But later he was asked to host on another occasion an infinity of congresses (each involving an infinity of mathematicians), and eventually an infinity of Symposiums (each containing an infinity of congresses with infinities of participants)… The owner at every step was clever enough to assign a room number to every single speaker and there seemed to be always room for more.
The composition is made in such a fashion that similarly each musical sentence (representing a room) would repeat itself inserting some new inhabitants at every iteration. Progressively the piece seems to be enumerating these rooms and their content as if it would never end inflating itself in different ways. At the point (the end of the printed music) where the motel almost seems full, the music returns to the beginning, inserting new guests and giving the impression that it could go on forever .
This piece is dedicated to Michel Gonneville who was my musical composition teacher at the Conservatoire de Montréal for many years. It won a First Prize at the SOCAN young composers competition in 2001.