pour flûte amplifiée et échantillonneur
Although I usually fancy titles that have interesting dual meanings in French and English (or ideally even more languages) this piece has an English title, no doubt about it! In French you would translate trigger as détente which is bizarrely also a synonym for relaxation (sic!), but we don’t have such a proper word as “trigger”. This is really a partita; a sequence of abstract dance movements. Of course, instead of a succession of movements, one will not be surprised I took the option of mixing them all together into one giant soup of delicious musical ingredients. The various “dances” are triggered by extraneous sounds in what looks like a nightmarish musical labyrinth from which the flutist tries to escape...
Although I use the word “trigger” for the first time in a title, triggering events are omnipresent in my recent works, often in the form of prerecorded samples that are to be played on a keyboard. I see them as the skeleton of the piece, revealing the frame of the composition: they appear at irregular intervals of time that create a supra-rythm... The “meat” around that skeleton is actually all the music performed by the flutist, with references to many many musical genres; I wanted it to be an homage to Michel Gonneville and a rememberance of my study years, where I recall numerous trips to the library where we would listen to pieces that for me seemed to fall right form the sky, at a time where my musical connoisseurship was limited to the well-known “serious” music repertoire. I have a general feeling of plurality when I think of M. Gonneville: it is not evident if you don’t know him, but he is truly a man with an extraordinarily wide musical knowledge and a talent to transmit it to others. I think Trigger-Partita reflects, if not the whole spectrum of what I think of when referring to Gonneville and the years I spend in his class, at least a general feeling of the possibility of everything!
The work can be performed as a duet (electronics or percussions or other triggering device) or with a group of rotating performers with percussion instruments or other triggering device.
— André Ristic