CHAMBER MUSIC_
Piece for clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, viola and violoncello.
Commissioned by Radio France for “Alla Breve”with Anne Montaron.
Premiered on May 7, 2017 at the Théâtre de l’Aquarium, Paris by the “Ensemble Aleph”: Dominique Clément – clarinette, Sylvie Drouin – piano, Jean-Charles François – percussion, Monica Jordan – voix, Christophe Roy – violoncelle, Noëmi Schindler – violon, Michel Pozmanter – direction.
Dedicated to Ensemble Aleph
Ashpa rupaj means in quichua language « Hot land ». The principal idea of the piece was to create different sonorities to reflect characteristic sounds of the native music of northern Argentina. The originality of the music of this region consists precisely in its great timbral richness, which draws its power on a kind of primitive and complex sound. It is a music characterized by quick change of registers, abrupt fluctuations of intensity, the use of glissandos, guttural sounds, nasal sounds, sounds which are at the limit between singing and crying.
But it is above all the flagrant contrast between an extreme simplicity in the form and a deep complexity in the timbre that is at the origin of what I consider the expressive force of traditional music. This is this particularity that I wanted to capture in this piece.
Audio link_
For saxophone quartet (SATB)
Premiered on November 29 at La Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur, Montréal by QUASAR, saxophone quartet.
Dedicated to QUASAR saxophone quartet
« Constructed from the material that contains the memory of the men and women of the world, from fragments of fabrics offered and coming from various cultures, The Cathedral Dress tells the genesis of life in twelve variations, twelve parts, twelve times: birth, childhood, adolescence, family, travels, passions, encounters, pluralities, partying, getting back to nature, meditation and death. »
Carole Simard – Laflamme
For the visual artist, Carole Simmard-Laflamme The Cathedral Dress thus crystallizes the traces of significant moments in life. It carries within it cultures and civilizations. The fabric recovered to create the works becomes the memory-material of men and women participating in a collective and multicultural installation in the very image of humanity.
Inspired by the architectural aspect of The Cathedral Dress as well as by the symbolic richness and singularity of the materials that compose it, we composed this piece based on the idea of weaving a complex sound space. Research has thus been focused on the design of the processes of transformation, metamorphosis, interpolation of materials: timbre, texture, density, friction, tearing, colors, fusion, diffraction, reflection of light and sound, vibration, shattering, dazzling.
Divided into two main parts: Cathedral-Light and Cathedral Dress, the piece is structured into twelve moments that symbolize the twelve periods of Simard-Laflamme’s work.
Audio link_
Trio for violin, cello and piano
Premiered on February 3 2017 by the Land’s End Ensemble as part of the University of Calgary’s Forms of Sound Festival.
Dedicated to the Land’s End Ensemble.
Don Liborio Avila is the portrait of an old man who lived in a small town in Santiago del Estero, in northern Argentina, where the heat, the silence, the desolation, the asperity of the earth and the air, resound in the skin of its habitants. Don Liborio Avila personify a particular culture, that of absence, that of simplicity and resignation, that of solitude, poverty and contemplation. But a mute violence haunts the landscape and manifests itself abruptly in music, in cries, in hands in regards.
It is to the image of this landscape that I musically constructed the portrait of Don Liborio. I worked the idea of contrast between an extreme simplicity of form and gestures and a profound complexity in the matter of sound and timbre.
Audio Links_
For 2 sopranos, mezzo-soprano, baritone, 4 percussionists
Commissioned by Lawrence Cherney for Soundstreams with generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered by Virginia Hatfield, soprano, Eve-Lyn de La Haye, soprano, Krisztina Szabo, mezzo-soprano, Giles Tomkins, bass-baritone and the Tambuco Percussion Ensemble on October 16, 2010 at the CERVANTINO Festival, Mexico.
What did we need for utopia to triumph over reality?
What defeated utopia?
ANDRES RIVERA – Revolution is an eternal dream
As complexly layered in its sonic materials as it is in its political motivation, El sueño de Aquiles (The Dream of Aquiles) is a setting of a poem by Mexican writer José Manuel Recillas. The Aquiles of the title refers not only to the Greek warrior Achilles, the central character of Homer’s Iliad, but also to Aquiles Serdán, one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution. Through its mirroring of these two characters, one mythical, the other real, the text raises the eternal question of humanity’s future and confronts the despairing thought that the struggle for freedom may prove everlasting. The composition calls for four immense percussion setups, placed at the front and back of a room. Four percussionists create a gamut of textures from low bass-drum rumblings to shimmering cymbal harmonics. Meanwhile, four voices alternate between clusters of close harmonies, complex rhythmic Sprechstimme, and intricate contrapuntal lines.
Audio link_
For marimba and cello
Commisioned by Stick&Bow: Krystina Marcoux and Juan Sebastian Delgado with generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered by Stick&Bow on October 19 2023 at Théâtre La Chapelle Scènes Contemporaines, Montréal
This piece is dedicated to Krystina Marcoux and Juan Sebastian Delgado, and it is written in memory of my friend Alejandro Staricco.
« I don’t know the name of the statues, but I know that marble has frozen their lives, and that there is something striking from within. »
Esther Ramondelli, « De heridas y luciérnagas »
What if we were all like statues locked inside marble, preserving our lives but depriving ourselves of expressing freely? What if this marble took the name of fear, illness, or simply helplessness?
I have tried to imagine what strikes us from within, what is alive and seeks a crevice to escape. Thus, an ephemeral melodic line is born from within. It awakens the most organic sounds, transforming both into roughness and fragility, like a contained scream.
Audio Link_
(Coming soon)
Trio for violin, cello and accordion
Premiered by Christine Paté, accordéon, Valerie Dulac, violoncelle and Jérémie Siot, violon on February 21, 2009 at the SAT, Société des Arts Téchnologiques de Montréal.
Commissioned by the GRAME, the National Centre for Musical Creation in Lyon, through its director James Giroudon and accordionist Christine Paté with the support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.
« A man possesses himself by thinning, and even when he possesses himself, he does not attain himself quite.
He does not realize this constant cohesion of his forces without which any true creation is impossible. ‘
Antonin Artaud, Correspondence with Jacques Rivière, 1924
The piece is structured in four different moments that I call «fragments», not because of their duration but rather in order to refer to a moment of time closed on it-even and ephemeral, but which nevertheless proposes an idea and expresses a different intention compared to others. My purpose is to situate each «fragment» in an atemporal position, that is to say, without establishing a relationship with a previous or future idea, without any goal of development in time, but rather as a manifest sound gesture in a continuous present, absolute and unreal. Instead of thinking of the form as a totality, I propose to capture the essence of a different gesture in each fragment and to make the most of its expressive possibilities. These gestures are, for example, a timbre of the accordion from which the strings emerge, the idea of spatialization and projection of sound in space and more precisely in the first fragment, the idea of tinkling, hum and impurity of sound borrowed from the phenomenon of tinnitus sounds.
For flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin and cello
Premiered by the Virâj ensemble directed by Mélanie Leonard on February 2003 at the Claude Champagne Hall, Faculty of music of the Montréal University.
Dedicated to Guillaume Fernandez-Vega
Audio Link_
String quartet
Premiered by the Molinari, string quartet, Olga Ranzenhofer – violon; Antoine Bareil – violon; Frédéric Lambert – alto; Pierre-Alain Bouvrette – violoncelle on October 19 2013 at the Concert Hall of the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal.
Commissioned by Olga Ranzenhofer, the artistic director of the Molinari string quartet with the support of the Canadian Council for the Arts.
Dedicated to the Molinari string quartet
“At the lower part of the march, towards the right, I saw a small sphere of shimmering colors, which spread an almost unbearable shine. I thought at first that it was turning; then I understood that this movement was an illusion produced by the vertiginous spectacles it contained. The diameter of Aleph must have been two or three centimeters, but the cosmic space was there, without any decrease in volume. Everything (the mirror glass, for example) amounted to an infinity of things, because I could see it clearly from every point in the universe.”
Jorge Luis Borges, Aleph, 1966
Inspired by the eponymous novel by Jorge Luis Borges, I wanted to create in this piece a complex space consisting of several layers of sounds or sound events. My intention is to invite listening to a multidimensional space rather than listening subordinate to a directional and temporal line. In this perspective, the play of nuances, the irregular duration of events, the multiplicity of possibilities of string play, the fact of making perceptible certain processes of formal evolution, as well as the choice to make identifiable certain sound gestures allowed me to build this Aleph whose reading and interpretations can be multiple.
This approach is part of a continuing search for a musical dramaturgy that best reflects the idea of open form, that is, a place of fragility continually subjected to the emergence of new sound, gestural and visual events—a sensitive space, and in constant transformation.
Audio Link_
For eight flutes and solo cello.
Commissioned by ECM+ with support from the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered on 8 November 2005 by the Ensemble de flûtes Alizé, conductor Véronique Lacroix, soloist Marie-Éve Bock at the Saint-Pierre Apôtre church in Montreal.
Recorded by Radio Canada
Inspired by the fable of the same name by Jean de Lafontaine, the approach I attempted in this piece aims to musically evoke not only the literary and formal aspect but especially the playful character of fables in relation to their projection in the human sphere. Since it is not a question of passing on a morality but of criticizing impostures that seem natural, these fables keep an exceptional durability.
For the composition of this work, I relied on three main aspects: 1. the notion of story-moral coexistence, man-animal, pleasure-instruction, 2. the idea of opposition, as a confrontation of musical elements and 3. sound spatialization. The idea of coexistence of elements is present through the unfolding of multiple characters in the solo dialogue of the cello at the beginning of the piece. The notion of opposition is evoked by the confrontation of a solo instrument with a mass of flutes but also within the various timbric games of the instruments. I particularly worked on the idea of spatialization in the construction of the mass texture of the flutes through the setting in motion of the same height or the same gesture that moves inside the ensemble of flutes. This movement of the musical gesture seeks the echo effect through a play of imitation and repetition that densifies this heap of sound to make it almost noisy.
The play is articulated through the main characters who, as in Lafontaine’s text, support the plot. In the formal aspect, the initial solo of the cello then the dialogue flute alto cello and the set of flutes that invade this dialogue, constitute a structure that also corresponds to that of the fable. However, the cello follows throughout the piece a gradual transformation of simplification of materials. It evokes at the end, devoid of the range of timbres and in a granular sound, an almost lyrical and dark character.
Audio link_
For mezzo-soprano, percussion, piano, violin and Double Bass
Premiered on April 9, 2019 at the Great Hall of Toronto by Andrea Ludwig, mezzo-soprano; Jamie Drake, percussion; John Kameel Farah, keyboard; Jesse Dietschi, bass and Erika Raum, violin.
Commissioned by Lawrence Cherney with the generous support of Michael and Sonja Koerner
I chose to work on “Lust” inspired by the notions of excess, transgression, ecstasy, disorder and eroticism that are related to this word. “Lust” finds its essence in the pleasure of the transgression of forbidden, in the delectation of going beyond what seems natural and socially accepted more than in the pursuit for frenzied sexual pleasure.
In this quest for immoderation and disrespect for the rules, I find my inspiration in William Burroughs’s « The Naked Lunch ». The reading of this book is destabilizing. Hallucinations, delusions of scientific character, metamorphoses, terrifying and comical erotic scenes, make us taste lust in its purest state. We could say then that the strength of this universe of delirium and madness comes from the fact that we are entering another reality that we must believe in order to hang on.
My intention is thus to musically translate this vertiginous and psychedelic literary universe by creating a sort of whirlwind sound that will take the listener in different directions-situations without him being able to predict or escape them. I intend to inspire myself by the way the book was « built », from the many disconnected and disparate texts, to experiment with a composition technique like the cut-up (cutting-editing) that characterizes the authors of the Beat Generation as well as the concrete music of Pierre Schaeffer.
I’m experimenting in compose several fragments but without necessarily creating a link between them. Different combinations of instruments, different tempos and characters punctuate the musical material. Once the fragments will be written I will proceed to the cutting and assembly. This moment of the process is decisive since it concerns a re-composition of the work, that is to say, the reorganization of the fragments and their segmentation if necessary. To guide this process, the ideas of contrast and irregularity will be a premise.
At the level of the text, I chose short excerpts from the book that will show different situations. In this way, the voice take a preeminent role in this play because of its dramatic strength as well as the various vocal emission techniques it is request to give life to multiple characters.
Duo for violin and cello
Commissioned by the Trio Fibonacci
Premiered on December 10, 2010 by Gabriel Prynn and Julie-Anne Derome at the Redpath Hall, McGill University, Montréal.
Dedicated to Pedro Llugdar
This piece is inspired by the visual effect produced by the reflection of light on the water. From this image, I tried to reproduce the shimmering and incessant movement of light reflections with fragmented and multiplied musical actions.
The main idea of the piece is that of the constant movement of a sound object that splits and transforms itself from the superposition of several layers. The speed play of the two instruments creates a sound continuum in a rich texture of natural harmonics with progressive changes of timbre and velocity. The idea of always moving forward permeates the character of the entire piece.
Audio link _
For string quartet
Commissioned by Olga Ranzenhofer, artistic director of the Molinari string quartet
Premiered by Molinari string quartet on November 2015 at the Fondation Guido Molinari de Montréal.
Nuances: the idea of the influence of sunlight on sculpture of Linda Howard’s Star Petal and consequently on our way of perceiving it, led me to the development of a simple gesture of gradual transformation of sound matter. Indeed, the way in which we perceive sculpture is in constant renewal thanks to the «light» factor that is an intrinsic part of the work. In the same way, I composed music that plays on the perception modeled by repetition, transformation and timbric changes within a dynamic temporal structure.
Audio Link_
Commissioned by Olga Ranzenhofer, artistic director of the Molinari string quartet
Premiered by Molinari string quartet on November 2015 at the Fondation Guido Molinari de Montréal.
Petal – Fusion: inspired by the « Star Petal » sculpture of Linda Howard, this short piece seeks to capture the energy condensed in this sculpture to create a dense and dynamic sound mass. Like sculpture, a homogeneous texture is built on the basis of chords that split into independent lines that eventually merge and disappear in the line of the cello.
Audio Link_
For trumpet, trombone, saxophone and piano.
Premiered and recorded by ensembles Klangforum Wien & Performance Practice in Contemporary Music – KUG:
Mikael Rudolfsson – trombone (Klangforum Wien)
Joonas Ahonen – piano (Klangforum Wien)
David Schmidt – trumpet (PPCM)
Katherine Oseid – saxophone (PPCM)
December 12, 2019 at the Concert Hall of the Conservatory of Larisa, Greece.
Commissioned as part of OutHEAR New Music Days, Larissa, Greece 2019.
Video Link_
For flute, clarinet, cor, piano, violin and cello
Premiered by SMCQ, Société de Musique Contemporaine du Québec conducted by Walter Boudreau on April 17 2014 at Salle Pierre-Mercure – Centre Pierre-Péladeau, Montréal.
Dedicated to the composer Denis Gougeon
Reflet is built from a melody extracted from the piece «Piano soleil» by Denis Gougeon. A simple process of stretching this original melodic line is the basis of the composition of the piece. Indeed, this melodic line of a duration of 20 seconds in the work of Gougeon, envelope here the total of the piece.
The melodic line is underlined by several sound production techniques inside the piano that reveal the melody in motion and constant transformation. Some of these techniques are: the alternation of tremolos and trills between two or three notes, the degree of pressure of the fingers on the strings that can go up to the muffled sound, the position of the fingers on the strings (near the bridge, in front of the ankle etc.) which determines the presence of harmonics more or less sound and thus has an influence on the timbre of the sounds produced. There is also the touch of two or three of the strings that normally produce the sound, the pizzicatos on the free strings and the slight distortion of the sound result of touching the strings with the nail. The interventions of the other instruments are a consequence of this melodic line; while strengthening the gesture, they merge with the main melody of the piano by bringing to the sound changes of timbre and dynamism.
Written in tribute to Denis Gougeon, my piece Reflet tries in this way to translate the expressive force found in the music of this great composer who had a strong influence on my music and on my person. It was with admiration and respect that I wanted to «reflect» his music as a continuation, as a desire to perpetuate his imagination and his art.
Audio Link_
For Mezzo-soprano, oboe, harp, piano, 3 percussions,
Commissioned by Lawrence Cherney, the artistic director of Soundstreams Canada.
Premiered on September 29 2015 at the Koerner Hall, TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning, Toronto, by Melissa Scott, oboe; Erica Goodman, harp; John Hess, piano; Michelle Colton, percussion; Dan Morphy, percussion et
Ryan Scott, percussion.
This piece is inspired by the poem Romance de la luna, luna by Federico Garcia Lorca
Audio Link_
For Soprano, Flute, Percussion and Multimedia.
The revised version of this piece was premiered on October 11, 2012 at the ‘Celebrate with Soundstreams’ concert at Koerner Hall in Toronto (Canada) by Shannon Mercer, soprano, Julie Ranti, flute and Ryan Scott percussion.
This piece was inspired by the ‘cacerolazos’, a demonstration accompanied by the clattering of saucepans in protest against Argentina’s economic and political situation that culminated in December 2001. The words are from the poem ‘Oración de un desocupado (Prayer of the Unemployed)’ by Argentinian poet Juan Gelman.
Audio Link_
For Viola da gamba et clavecin
Commissioned by Fiolûtröniq Cléo Palacio-Quintin (flûtes et électronique) Elin Söderström (viole de gambe) & Katelyn Clark (clavecin) with the genereux support of the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec.
Premiered by Elin Söderström (viole de gambe) & Katelyn Clark (clavecin) on March 8, 2011 at La Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur de Montréal as part of the program of composer-in-residence Cléo Palacio-Quintin.
La Telesita is a legend from the north of Argentina that relates the life of a very poor girl who lived without family in the woods of Santiago del Estero. Her passion for dance led her to dance non-stop until she fell to the floor exhausted by fatigue. A tragic end marks her life, because she dies burned by the fire that warmed her.
La Telesita and La folia share the same symbolism, that of madness, excess and vertigo associated with the repetition of a gesture that constantly gives the dance its ritual character.
I wanted to revive the image of La Telesita from fragments of sounds that stand out from the initial chords of La folia and gradually take the strength and spirit of the dance through the repetition of the same motif.
Audio Link_
Trio for violin, cello, and piano.
Commissioned by the Jeunesses musicales du Canada.
Premiered on January 25, 2005 by the Trio Fibonacci, Gabriel Prynn, cello; Julie-Anne Derome, violin and Anna D’Errico, piano at the Chapelle Historique du bon pasteur, Montréal.
Dedicated to the Trio Fibonacci
The piece is constructed from the concept of attack-resonance. The attack is conceived as a generating point, triggering this resonance. The driving idea of Tricycle is precisely the composition of the resonance, that is, of its writing, of the notation of everything that is detached from the attack, and of its subsequent development. The notion of continuity and that of variation in all its forms: transformation, mutation, distortion and even distortion, are the indispensable tools for entering into the complexity of the sound material, for decomposing and composing textures, timbres and sounds. In this way, the image of resonance as a vestige of sound is replaced by that of resonance as a process of reconstruction that involves the selection of the sound object to be reworked, its subjection to perpetual changes and its progressive affirmation as a new material capable of unleashing new forms of “resonance”.
Audio link_
Miniature for soprano, clarinet, trompet in C, percussion, violin and cello.
Commissioned and premiered by the Ensemble Aleph : Dominique Clément – clarinette, Sylvie Drouin – piano, Jean-Charles François – percussion, Monica Jordan – voix, Christophe Roy – violoncelle, Noëmi Schindler – violon, Michel Pozmanter – direction.
Dedicated to the Aleph ensemble in its 30th anniversary
This miniature is inspired by the short story by Jorge Luis Borges L’Aleph.
LARGE ENSEMBLE_
For flute, oboe, 2 cl., basoon, horn, trompet, trombon, percussion, piano, 2 violin, viola, cello, doublebass.
Premiered by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM) conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt on August 20 2001 at the Concert Hall of Domain Forget, Charlevoix, Québec.
Inspired by the painting Wheatfield with Crows by Vincent Van Gogh, this piece maintains a close relationship between music and painting, an essential relationship in the construction of discourse.
Several words of pictorial art have strongly influenced the design of this work such as: light-shadow, depth, balance (unity and rupture), color, superimposition of brush strokes, density, values (intensity).
The title of the composition was taken from a passage from a letter of the painter to his brother Theo and it refers in no way to the character of the musical piece but simply to the admirable creative sensitivity of the artist to refer with metaphors to each of the colors he discovers
Audio Link_
For flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trompet, trombon, percussion, piano, 2 violin, viola, cello, doublebass.
Recorded by the Ensemble Contemporaine de Montréal directed by Véronique Lacroix March 9, 2003 at the Salle Pierre Mercure, Montreal, by Radio Canada. Directed by Laurent Major.
“The ideal genetic element of variable curvature, or fold, is inflection.
The inflection is the true atom, the elastic point.” Gilles Deleuze, Le pli.
In the same way that an inflection point in a curve generates a change of
direction, a new fold, in a musical discourse, these strategic points mean the
starting point of a new element.
This piece, like the Deleuzian fold, follows a curve with four points of inflection
from which the discourse snakes. For each of these points the discourse converges in unison, the first and last of which establish the beginning and end of the piece.
The discourse is a great active line where the melodic and timbral element constitutes the main engine generator. From this line emerges harmony (its side
convex).
Inflexions center its energy on the recurrence of the same element which is stretched and releases along the way, this element being visible (unfolded) and obscured (folded) to different moments.
Audio Link_
Pour dix sept instruments.
Crée le 17 mars 2000 par l’ensemble Creato de l’Université Laval, dir. Cristian Gort, salle Henri Gagnon, Québec.
For solo piano and 2fl. Cl, oboe, bsn, horn, tr. , trbn, perc. , 2 vl, viola, cello, doublebass.
Commissioned by Radio-Canada.
Premiered on May 28, 2008 by the Ensemble Contemporaine de Montréal, conducted by Véronique Lacroix at the Pierre Péladeau Centre, Montreal.
Que sommes nous? What are we?
« And where is the place of the human self in this madness?
Van Gogh searched for his throughout his life, with strange energy and determination.
And he did not commit suicide in a fit of madness, in the trance of not achieving it, but on the contrary he had just achieved it and discovered what he was and who he was, when the general conscience of society, to punish him for having snatched himself from it, suicidal.”
Antonin Artaud, «Van Gogh the suicide of society», 1947
What are we? Antonin Artaud, like Diogenes Laertes, seeks man or a sample of what humanity should be. This question problematizes the relationship between the individual and society. Following this line of thought, in this piece, the piano plays the role of the man who manifests himself musically through contrasting patterns arranged in an apparent disorder and the orchestra plays the society which, in this case, is the capricious product of this man. The piano, through its motifs and in accordance with the character of man, seeks the extremes of its possibilities. These motifs exhibited at the beginning of the piece already contain all the material that will be reworked and developed later. It is from these motifs and by extending the resonances of the piano that the orchestra gradually appears. Thus occurs a sound spatialization in which there is a duplication of the gesture presented by the piano. So the orchestra creates a kind of echo of the piano, which symbolizes the projection of the individual on society.
Audio Link_
All the present memories enveloped that sound and something looked at me (10’) 2007
For fl, 2cl, htb, bsn, cor, tr, trbn, perc, pno, 2vln, alto, vlc, cb.
Commissioned by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM) with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered: March 16, 2008, by the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne conducted by Lorraine Vaillancourt, as part of the Biennal Musique en Scène de Grame, Lyon.
Dedicated to Lorraine Vaillancourt et le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne.
All the present memories enveloped that sound and something looked at me reflects on the place of memory within artistic creation in general, and particularly in music. It also aesthetically reflects the importance of memory in the lives of people as a weapon of resistance. The title of the piece belongs to a poem by Leonel Lienlaf, a Mapuche poet, which evokes the memory of oral literature received from his grandmother. In this spirit, I use the idea of memory as a reparative gesture that repeats itself, seeks itself, and is constructed in the process of returning to itself. Within this process, changes in timbre are the material of a permanent transformation. The notion of memory here intersects with that of resonance, and several musical ideas emerge from a generative element. The piece consists of twelve sections articulated by contrasts, gradual transformation, or triggering elements that appear at random. These sections are like memory, not a logical evocation but a disorder of infinite possibilities that make sense. »
Audio link_
SOLO_
Commissioned by Matt Haimovitz and Jeffrianne Young for THE PRIMAVERA PROJECT
Premiered on April 23, 2023 at Bargemusic, New York by Matt Haimovitz
Dedicated to Vitalie
ANIMA VENTO is inspired by the idea of breath present in Primavera by Sandro Botticelli and in Primavera 2020 by Charline von Heyl.
I was particularly drawn to the image of the wind in Botticelli’s painting as a generator of life and movement. This idea manifests itself, for example, in the gesture of Zephyr who blows on Chloris, giving rise to the exhalation of roses from her mouth. It is this same breath that brings about the folds of the draperies and the one that in von Heyl’s work causes a bursting of materials, a superposition of spaces that bring the characters to life.
Like this breath, ANIMA VENTO is built from a generative sound, fragile and robust at the same time, which gradually multiplies, metamorphosizes into different timbral materials and plays on the idea of an ever-fluctuating speed to create the feeling of depth in the acoustic space.
I have always considered that the interpreter adds his own « breath » to the music, a creative breath which modulates the sound. This is why it is an honor to have ANIMA VENTO interpreted by the great talent and sensitivity of Matt Haimowitz, to whom I would like to express all my admiration.
Audio links_
https://lnk.to/PrimaveraIVtheheart
https://www.theprimaveraproject.com/composer/analia-llugdar/
For saxophone soprano and électroniques. Co-composed with Cédric Camier
Commissioned by Guillaume Boutard, Faculty of Arts and Science – School of Library and Information Science, Montréal university
Premiered on February 2014 at CIRMMT
The blue bow
For solo violin
Commissioned by Trio Fibonacci
Dedicated to Mara
Premiered on december 10, 2010 by Julie-Anne Derome at the Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur, Montréal.
It is a short piece that materializes in a fleeting, almost illusory and stealthy way.
The blue bow is a metaphor for an imaginary object that allows the instrumentalist to open up an unheard-of sonic dimension.
For flute in C, flute in G and electronics
Commissioned by Marie Hélène Breault with support from the Canada Council for the Arts
Dedicated to Marie Hélène Breault.
Premiered on March 14, 2010 by Marie-Hélène Breault at the National Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec.
Through this piece for solo and electronic flute, incorporating elements of musical theatre, I seek to highlight some distinctive characteristics of the music and culture of the aborigines. These are specifically musical features such as certain inflections in singing obtained by the use of glissandos, inaccurate intonations that are close to quarter tones, the recurrence of certain intervals as the major third, the minor third and the fifth, the frequent use of the blow of glottis at the end of each sentence, the lacerated vocal emission and the use of cry as well as breathing.
My interest in this Aboriginal music lies in its great timbral richness that comes from the raw sound. I use these timbral materials to subject them to multiple transformations. These transformations are the result of the relationships between the different possibilities of sound emission of the flute, the vocal sounds, the electronics and the dramatic aspect.
Audio Link_
Piece for organ
Commissioned by Nicolas-Alexandre Marcotte.
Premiered by Nicolas-Alexandre Marcotte on February 2, 2015 at the Saint Joseph Oratory, Montreal.
For solo cello
Commissioned by cellist Gabriel Prynn and composed with the support of the Conseil des arts et de lettres du Québec.
Premiered on october 25 2009 at the New music festival TRANSIT, Leuven, Belgium.
Dedicated to à Gabriel Prynn.
“Yes, it doesn’t rain much. Almost not, so little that the earth, besides being dry and hard like old leather, is filled with crevices and stuff that’s nothing but pieces of earth as hard as sharp stones, that stick in your feet when you step on it, as if he had pushed thorns to the ground. Yes, that’s the way it is..” Luvina in Le llano en flames, Juan Rulfo
This composition is inspired by the conjunction of limits that merge in the same space: Luvina. In this rich and complex sound space are joined the dizziness of silence and desolation. Luvina, the root of misery, evokes a phantasmagorical village invaded by despair. The area, the wind, the shadows, the whispers provide a setting between real and unreal. These extreme images are translated by the cello in an effort that calls for all its expressive force.
Like this village, I composed a piece that from the sound of the trills of natural harmonics gradually deploys more complex textures. The breadth of the sound possibilities of the cello led me to explore and use incisively the potentialities of this solo instrument to create a listening space in permanent transformation.
Audio Link_
for cello, soprano and electroacoustic
This piece is part of the ballet JUANA for four dancers, cello, clarinet, soprano
and electroacoustic treatment.
JUANA is a commission of the CIRM through its artistic director François Paris. The electroacoustic part of the work was realized in the studios of the CIRM with the RIM Mónica Gil Giraldo.
The piece is inspired by the poem Spleen LXXVIII of the book Les fleurs du mal by Charles Beaudelaire.
Audio Link_
ORCHESTRAL_
For four soloists erhus and orchestra.
Commissioned by the SMCQ with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered on May 9, 2009 by the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra as part of the Shanghai Spring International Music Festival, Shanghai, Chine.
The erhu sonority and timbre represent in my view the colour of the so rich and contrasting Chinese culture. This is the reason why the ehru is the figure from which I composed this piece. From this perspective, I decided to work with two ehrus and two zhonghus in order to develop a uniform texture, which will become the unifying thread along the whole piece. This texture emerges as a force that draws its way in the orchestral mass. The structure of the piece is based on the notion of “contrast”, which I perceived not only in Chinese music, but also in Chinese art and culture, as well as in the city of Shanghai. This is expressed in the piece by the confrontation between its lyric style, manifested in the Skyline Alme melody, and the percussive nature of the Da gu. Another element of the piece is the excess and saturation in the treatment of textures and timbres in the sound material, which reminds of the baroque and ornamental style of Chinese esthetics.
Video Link_
Orchestral piece for mezzo-soprano and ensemble of 35 musicians.
Commissioned by the ECM+ and the Appassionata Ensemble with the support
of the Canada Council for the Arts.
Premiered on September 19, 2012 at Salle Pierre Mercure under the direction of
Véronique Lacroix.
The work is inspired by the poem “Invitation to the Air” by the Spanish poet
Rafael Alberti and the poetic and musical universe of “sorcerer’s love” by
Manuel de Falla.
It is structured in two very contrasting parts, the first of which presents a
continuous and agitated movement, characterized by high density textures.
These textures are based on
tutti chords which, like harmonic pillars, articulate the discourse. The second part
emerges as a shadow of the first, in a more intimate and nostalgic character
exalted by Alberti’s poetry.
A childhood memory, the sense of mystery and admiration that aroused in me
when I visited Manuel de Falla’s house in Alta Gracia, Argentina, at the age of
six, permeates the composition of the piece. Like a chimera, a fantasy, I wanted
to reconstruct this visit through the musical imagination to return from the hand
of Alberti’s poetry to this house which represents in itself the rich world of
Spanish culture.
Audio link_
OPÉRA, BALLET AND MUSICAL THEATRE_
OPÉRA for 2 soprano et mezzo-soprano, accordion, percussion, electric guitar, saxophone, trombone, cello.
Playwriting: Ana Candida de Carvalho Carneiro
Premiered: The first two scenes were created by Chant libres and its artistic director Marie-Annick Béliveau as part of Oper’Actuel 2019.
Appena prima/Appena dopo is born as an experiment that lies between musical composition, playwriting and sound spatialisation. The audience is dragged into a turmoil of voices, and can just grab fragments from a cathedral of words and sounds to intuitively compose, filling the gabs, a meaningful story.
Three women in three different parts of the planet leading three completely different lives, yet so similar internally. In terms of writing technique, the play starts with regular monologues, alternating characters one at a time. As a matter of fact, the play is a combination of monologues from the beginning to the end, as the characters never actually meet and establish a regular dialogue; but at a certain point those monologues intertwine with each other, producing a polyphony of voices and installing deeper levels of meaning. Suddenly, the play is not just about three different women in three different countries, with three different life motivations and problems, but becomes the « acoustic space of solitude », where dissonant sounds, images, noises crash against each other giving birth to a fourth deeper and truer dimension. I would say that the core, the inmost sense of the play, is contained in it. We cannot say that it is drama, but it builds a tension that could be called « dramatic » in the broader sense of the word. The point of view, far from being realistic, bounces as a pin ball from one place to the other, smashing objectivity into pieces. What is staged (and heard) is the kaleidoscopic experience of subjectivity, fragmentary streams of conscience that converge into a whirling maelstrom that overwhelms everything.
It flows to a cathartic end that never comes, because unlike traditional drama, the non-drama never solves itself turning the key. There is an elusive door somewhere, or maybe not. As the Woman With The Toothbrush says: « [we are] perched on top of Unknown, just before just after the Catastrophe ». These verses evoke the destructive image of the Universal Flood, but also the impossibility of finding a sense to what mankind cannot comprehend, and the fact that we are always in the past or in the future, but never in the present – the key moment, the clue. It has also political connotations if we associate Catastrophe with turning point on History, Revolution, strong desire of change. In fact, the Woman With The Toothbrush speaks about her parents as failed revolutionaries; the Woman with the wound on her breast is married to a South American general, probably a partaker in Argentinean coup d’état; and the Woman with the Oxygen Cylinder belongs to a younger generation and does not conceive political participation, worried as she is about how to pay her bills.
Characters_
Woman with the Toothbrush
Woman with the Oxygen Cylinder
Woman with the Wound on her Breast
Dramatic piece for violin, double bass, trumpet, trombone, percussion, bassoon, clarinet and two actors
Commissioned by the Laval Symphonic Orchestra
Premiered by the musicians of the Lavan Symphonie Orchestra conducted by Jean-François Rivest on November 2004 at the André Mathieu Hall, Laval.
Inpired from the ABC of war by Bertolt Brecht, the piece consists of five acts, which follow one after the other without interruption.
For flute and toy piano
Premiered on October 4, 2003 at the Abbey of Royaumont by Isabel Ettenauer, toy piano and Sophie Deshayes, flutes.
« En elle-même toute idée est neutre, ou devrait l’être; mais l’homme l’anime, y projette ses flammes et ses démences; impure, transformée en croyance, elle s’insère dans le temps, prend figure d’événement : le passage de la logique à l’épilepsie est consommé…Ainsi naissent les idéologies, les doctrines, et les farces sanglantes. »
Généalogie du fanatisme, dans Précis de décomposition. E. M. Cioran
This piece is based on a text by Emil Cioran from his book: Précis de de decomposition. The spirit of this piece is above all critical. It challenges archetypes that are perceived as natural truths for man, such as the need to believe and the uncontrollable desire to impose one’s beliefs, religion, reason, the idea of nation, the concept of history, the idea of class, and the idea of race.
In this play I play with the coexistence of two characters on the same stage who alternate their reflections in a dialogue that is only the superposition of two monologues since each of the characters speaks to himself; hence the title of the play: “Monologue Dialogues”. This dialogue takes place on both a musical and a verbal level. The flute is the wandering, unstable character, the one who has lost his self, the one who was but is no longer. It is also he who changes places on stage several times and who leads the development of the musical plot. The piano, on the contrary, is always at the centre of the stage and shows a stubborn, suspended character and puts us in an almost hypnotic state. Musically, each of these instruments follows its own evolution although the language is the same.
Ballet for four dancers, soprano, clarinet, cello and electroacoustic.
Commissioned by CIRM, Centre National de Création Musical in Nice through
its artistic director François Paris with the help of the Ministry of Culture and
Communication of France and the Council for the Arts of Canada
Coproduction: Compagnie Humaine through its artistic director Éric Oberdorff
Premiered on December 14, 2012 at the Théâtre des Variétés in Monaco, as
part of the Monaco Dance Forum, CCN Malandain Ballet Biarritz. Production of
CIRM and Compagnie Humaine.
Chorégraphie: ERIC OBERDORFF
Soprano: DONATIENNE MICHEL-DANSAC
Cello: MYRTILLE HETZEL
Clarinet: ANNELISE CLÉMENT
Dancers: CÉCILE ROBIN PRÉVALLÉE
EMMA LEWIS
AUDREY VALLARINO
MARIKO AOYAMA
Electronics: MONICA GIL GIRALDO
Sound engineer: CAMILLE GIUGLARIS
Costumes : PHILIPPE COMBEAU
Lighting: BRUNO SCHEMBRI
Juana is one character and several characters at the same time. Like a broken mirror, she multiplies into various pieces that reflect a fragmented universe where the different facets of her life or lives coexist.
A voice/voices, a body/bodies, a desire/desires, fictions, songs, screams, heads, silences, sweat, legs, cries, gestures, bursts of laughter… She/they are manifesting.
My interest in the name Juana (Jeanne) comes from the fact that it is a very common name in different languages and at the same time, it is a name that has marked history, literature and art: Sister Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jeanne d’Arc, Jeanne Ire dite Jeanne la Folle, Juana Azurduy, Jeanne Mance, Jeanne Moreau, Jeanne Hébuterne, Giovanna Marini, Juana de Ibarbourou, Juana Manuela Gorriti, Johanna Dorothea Zoutel Juana Galán, among others.
The work is not built into the narrative of the time of life of these women. Rather, the idea is to create an open and complex space where the elements that characterise each of these characters coexist, intersect, erase, superimpose, reflect and disappear, in the way of memories, emotions, images, lived or imagined moments.
What attracts me above all to the idea of the multiplicity of women united under a single name is that the image of women
the reflection of ourselves: life becomes like a mirror made of images that pass and remain. And art is our only way of holding back time.
In this way, the notions of multiplicity and duplication of time and space have been chosen as fertile ground to create a theme that borders on the illusory and the real. The challenge is thus to design processes of transformation, metamorphosis and interpolation of sound and gesture:
timbre, density, energy, movement, speed, breadth, finesse, vitality. Disintegration of the sound mass and the body, disintegration of its components. Action-resonance. Burst. Listen to me. Touching. MRI.
Analía Llugdar – Montreal, February 2011
Video link_
Musical theatre piece based on the radiophonic text « Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu » by Antonin Artaud.
For one actor, mezzo- soprano, baritone, cl, tr, trbn, perc, piano, violin, viola and cello
Commissioned by Codes d’Accès as part of their 20th anniversary
Premiered on april 24, 2007 by Les Enfants terribles Ensemble conducted by Crstian Gort and Alice Ronfard, stage director.
Dedicated to Antonio De Maria and to Cristina Vallé
My interest in Antonin Artaud’s writings stems from their raw, explosive, excessive and corporeal language, from the author’s way of making words explode to find the gesture, and from his art of destroying meaning to let out the power of expression. The Artaud Faim is the Artaud Force, the appetite for creation, the organic desire to be heard to denounce the iniquitous order of a destructive and corrupt society.
In this work, it is not a question of telling a story, or of showing a character, or of making morals, but rather of reinterpreting the elements of Artaud’s existentialist critique in the light of contemporary man’s concerns. To fight against judgment, Artaud proposes the idea of a body without organs, a body cut off from all social ties, a body confined to itself and “delivered from all its automatisms”. It is an atomic, explosive body, which seeks to explode something in the consciousness. In this sense, the idea of the organic body, so present in Artaud’s texts, becomes the bond of attachment to the social world and Artaud thus highlights the primitive character of human behaviour.
Antonin Artaud develops a very original way of linking thought to artistic expression. In this sense, he rips words apart to recompose a new language made up of unconventional elements: glossolalia, phonemes, screams, signs, gestures, paper holes, erasures. All these elements form a language that leads a thought that causes a rupture with all worldly artifices. But is it possible to set Artaud’s texts to music in a way that does justice to his thinking? How can we approach the scenic representation of Artaud’s texts without betraying the work? How can we find the musical equivalent of a literature considered illegible and untranslatable? How do you interpret a text when you can’t find its subject? The bursting of literary language echoes the decay of the human body subjected to institutional structures. On this I tried to find the voice that resonates this thought carrying a raw and disarming expressiveness.
This is how I decided to stage Artaud himself and not just his texts, since he is ultimately the most significant “object-subject” of his work.
The fact that I chose Antonin Artaud as the “material” of my work does not indicate a tribute or an intention to revive a part of our Western culture in order to expose it to readers or listeners, like a museum. My intention is rather to listen to it, to think about it and to look at it in order to be enchanted by its incantations, its intonations of the theatre of gestures.
The music I composed for La faim Artaud is strongly influenced by theatrical art, by dramatic gestures, and by all the emotional charge contained in Artaud’s words. It is thus a work of musical reflection articulated on the basis of a critical reading of Pour en finir avec le jugement de god, which seeks to restore all the expressiveness and lyrical content of the original text.
Extraits :
KRÉPOUC TE 1A
Audio link_
KRÉ POUC TE 1B
Audio link_
WORKS WITH ELECTRONICS_
For saxophone soprano and electronics. Co-composed with Cédric Camier
Commissioned by Guillaume Boutard, Faculty of Arts and Science – School of Library and Information Science, Montréal University
Premiered on February 2014 at CIRMMT, MMR Hall by Marie Chantale Leclerc, soprano saxophone and Jean-Marc Bouchard bass saxophone
For bass clarinet and electronics
AS2Y is part of the ballet «JUANA».
Premiered by Annelise Clément on December 14 2012 at Monaco Dance Forum. Production delegate CIRM, coproduction Compagnie Humaine, Monaco Dance Forum/ CCN d’Aquitaine en Pyrénées- Atlantiques — Malandain Ballet Biarritz.
Soprano DONATIENNE MICHEL-DANSAC, Cellist MYRTILLE HETZEL, Clarinettist ANNELISE CLÉMENT. Dancers: CÉCILE ROBIN PRÉVALLÉE, EMMA LEWIS, AUDREY VALLARINO, MARIKO AOYAMA. Production Computer Music Monica Gil Giraldo Sound engineer Camille Giuglaris
JUANA, a stage. Seven women. All different, each unique. Yet strangely similar. Each mirror of the other? Analía Llugdar/ music & Éric Oberdorff/ choreography
Audio Link_