REW • PLAY • FFWD [2024] • for orchestra & electronics

Composed from childhood memories, in this work I was inspired by the sounds produced by the magnetic tape, a recording technology used in cassettes and VHS which introduced me to music and films. Using this type of media meant spending time manipulating the player/recorder by pressing the different buttons available: «rewind», «fast-forward», «stop», «play», «pause», «rec». By rewinding

- a necessary step in order to listen to the beginning of a cassette - we could listen to sounds accelerated, in reverse and transposed. If one were to unintentionally press the «rec» button, it could overwrite part of the original tape, forever changing its content and altering the perception of the whole thing. To make a compilation, you had to spend a lot of time pressing the different buttons in order to synchronize the source cassette and the recording cassette and patiently wait for each of them to play before pressing «stop» and move on to the next one.

The more we used these cassettes, the more they deteriorated and produced pitch variations, random loops, white noise or other types of defects that I find interesting today. This piece is a free transcription of the memories left by the use of this technology.

SWR Symphonieorchester

Vimbayi Kaziboni • Conductor

Matthias Schnider • Sound Engineer

Premiered at Donaueschinger Musiktage 2024

je ne suis qu'une voix [2019] • for ensemble, electronics and AI generated voice

An AI synthesized voice that questions its own identity and strives to become autonomous and intelligent. At the beginning, the voice merely reads a pre-written text, but by the end, it speaks an original text generated by the machine using AI.

Ensemble C Barré
Conductor • Sébastien Boin
RIM • Charles Bascou

Co-production IRCAM & GMEM Marseille

desert bloom [2022] • for double bass & electronics

Desert bloom is a piece for double bass and electronics, which highlights the natural harmonics of the strings. These sounds, played quickly and rhythmically, create a sonic fabric that is both delicate and virtuoso. A wobbly pulsation frames this music close to caprice or baroque invention, to give it a dreamlike and repetitive, even psychedelic, character.
Double bassist Florentin GINOT, leaning over his instrument, dances with it, brushing against it, touching it delicately but with precision. It is an intimate performance, a close listening, which invites an attention which does not impose a direction, but rather which encourages the abandonment of a search for the consequence. We allow ourselves to sensitively listen to the sound in its present moment, losing the notion of time.

Florentin Ginot • double bass
Pablo Garretón • recording

trace - écart [2017] • for harp, electric guitar, cymbalum, double bass & electronics

audible / inaudible pulse, that transits continuously from the surface to the depths, leaving always a trace in our listening. increase and accentuation of an implicit / explicit pulse give form to complex rhythms and poly-rhythms, creating diverse and overlapped cycles within. An underground force, a “ruissellement continu” , in which musical objects and rhythmic organizations emerge, taken the ephemeral form of an instant, within the infinite possibilities of this stream.

The four instruments sculpt and delimit this continuous space through their play, mostly characterized by plucking the strings. Electronics amplify, creating rhythmical networks, echoing or capturing and deploying the instrumental resonances, increasing the duration of sound’s sustains and decays. As a wandering, contrasting sections, succeeding one another in a non-directional voyage, following a trace that leads nowhere. In French the word trace is the palindrome of the word écart, meaning gap…

Wie die Zarten Blüten im Winter [2016] • for string quartet

“Schönes Leben! du lebst, wie die zarten Blüten im Winter”
Friedrich Hölderlin

The winter flower (the image chosen by Friedrich Hölderlin as the beginning of his poem entitled “An Diotima”) has at least two meanings, in apparent contradiction, that inspired me for the composition of this piece. In one hand, as the poet puts it, the fragility and in the other hand, the resistance while being alone and facing the hurricane (“und in frostiger Nacht zanken Orkane sich nun”). The contrasting attributs within the very core of a single object are the central topic of this work.

We can find this concept at the beginning of the piece by the succession of musical fragments with different tempos and various intentions (intense, suspended, fragile, lively, etc.) then, while these fragments become larger and more stable, by accentuations, speed changes or timber variations.
Another way of translating this poetical image into a musical level, was the settlement of a discourse based on the overlapping, or the transition, of harmonic and in-harmonic sounds (from a spectral point of view). Thus, we can see different instruments proposing simultaneously various degrees of “harmonicity”, or just one instrument slowly modifying its timber by a certain extended technic, changing its harmonic composition.
Finally, the conception and development of the musical material is also inspired by the idea of synthesis between fragility and resistance, using delicate and unstable ways of playing that, thanks to their persistance in time and micro variations, we can observe and understand from different angles.

Diotima String Quartet

YunPeng Zhao. VIOLIN 1
Constance Ronzatti VIOLIN 2
Franck Chevalier VIOLA
Pierre Morlet CELLO

Festival Musica 2016

[in]certi(é)tude [2014] • for prepared piano & electronics

“…we tend to live in a world of certainties, of unquestionable perceptif solidity in which our convictions prove that things exist only as we see them, and what seems certain to us cannot have another alternative. It is our everyday situation, our cultural condition, our common mode of being human.”

“The tree of knowledge“, Humberto Maturana 

Violaine Debever • Piano

“and matter was (not) perfectly conserved [2015] • for trio, ensemble & electronics

… Rien ne se perd, rien ne se crée, ni dans les opérations de l’art, ni dans celles de la nature, 

et l’on peut poser en principe que, dans tout opération, il y a une égale quantité de matière avant et après l’opération ; 

que la qualité et la quantité des principes est la même, et qu’il n’y a que des changements, des modifications…”. 

Antoine Lavoisier

This quote is taken from the “Traité élémentaire de chimie” d’Antoine Lavoisier and correspond to the description of the mass conservation law, expounded in 1777.

Nowadays we know that this law is approximate cause certain chemical reactions are not completely adjusted to a full conservation. This idea of approximating phenomenon behaviours of real world in a theoretical rule in order to understand it is the central idea of the piece.

I wanted to use the idea behind this law and the beautiful illusion that it proposes of a perfect system of transformation and conservation as a metaphor to the construction of a musical form made from musical “material” transformations.

The rhythmical, harmonic and timber components are used again and again all along the piece following successive and endless transformations. The soloist trio is often interrupted by intempestives interventions of the ensemble, which lead us to the idea of matter being decomposed and reorganised. This take place until the middle of the piece, from where the hole ensemble build a continuum based on granular and in-harmonic sounds. Towards the end, we hear the trio again as soloists, proposing a new organisation, made from the first sonorities of the piece.

This cyclic idea has the purpose to give the impression of matter being conserved even after several transformations. But even this cycle is interrupted in order to question what seemed coherent in what we have listened until now. Or simply to try to understand the hole from another point of view.

standard-modell • Antoine Alerini, Noam Bierstone & Joshua Hyde

Orchestre des Lauréats du CNSMDP

Laurent Cuniot • Conductor

flux [2023] • for electric guitar, objects & electronics

Under the trees in the garden of the St Étienne Church in Beauvais, like the lines of a drawing in space, appears Flux, a sculpture imagined by the artist Cécile Le Talec for this site. Around and through it, the greenery, the columns of the building, the church enter into its composition.

The sculpture is made up of stainless steel threads which give the illusion of having been led like weft threads between warp threads, as they would be called for a loom. Together, they form an extraordinary mesh. The city's drapery and textile activity will undoubtedly have inspired the artist. Flush with the ground, without a base or foundation, the sculpture evokes the light form of an organdi canvas or a large drape, which would have come to rest in this green setting.

Or would it, on the contrary, be a lifting of the ground? Throughout his creative residency in Beauvais, the artist collects sounds of the city, draws and writes in a notebook about the history of the site. She records the flocks of bells, the song of blackbirds and starlings, and sees the material thus brought together as a whole, in an approach of synthesis of the arts.

Cécile Le Talec thus invites the composer Francisco Alvarado to imagine, in turn, a second work: an original composition, created according to his musical and personal interpretation of the spectrographic form of the sculpture. This sound creation, inseparable from the work, will be played during the inauguration as part of a performance.

For the two artists, an invisible link seems to connect the line of the first drawings, the stainless steel wire of the sculpture and the acoustic wave generated by the music. As if the whole thing was moving and vibrating in the air until it produced a visual and audible sensation in us.

Francisco Alvarado • electric guitar & electronics
Cécile Le Talec • objects

Pièce pour deux duos d'improvisateurs (2013) - for 2 saxophones & 2 prepared pianos

Francisco Alvarado

Carmen Lefrançois, Vincent Lê Quang - Saxophones

Alvise Sinivia, Alexandros Markeas - Piano

A mirror work to Mozart's String Quartet No. 19
The “Parisii” Quartet, celebrating its 40th anniversary, has decided to return to the roots of the string quartet by performing works by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. The musicians of the “Parisii” are always deeply committed to musical creation, and they wanted to incorporate a contemporary piece that integrates and dialogues with these classical works.
I chose Mozart's String Quartet No. 19 as a reference because it occupies a central place in the development of the string quartet genre, drawing inspiration from Haydn's quartets while also anticipating the future with Beethoven's. The movements of Konsonanzenquartett are thus related to those of Mozart, creating a kind of mirror game.
Mozart's String Quartet No. 19 features a striking harmony in its opening movement, unusual for the time. This work is commonly referred to as “the quartet of dissonances.” Since then, music has evolved, and dissonances have come to be placed on equal footing with consonances. Today, proposing a work based on consonances could seem as strange as the dissonances in Mozart's time.
Thus, I imposed upon myself the challenge of composing with many consonances, while at the same time exploring unheard timbres. Each movement focuses on specific “playing techniques”: glissando, pizzicato, legno battuto (striking the wood), etc.
The title of the piece, Konsonanzenquartett, is therefore a nod to Mozart's work.
The string quartet is firmly embedded in tradition and remains one of the privileged laboratories for composers. It represents a field of experimentation that composers from all eras have taken advantage of, from Haydn to the present day, including Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Ravel, Schoenberg, Berg, Janáček, Boulez, Nono, and Lachenmann, to name just a few.

Quatuor Parisii

Arnaud Vallin • first violin

Florent Brannens • second violin

Dominique Lobet • viola

Jean-Philippe Martignoni • violoncello