
" le lieu et la formule (2019) "
Pour ensemble
Editions Maison ONA, n°ONA 0123
SÉLECTION 2020
- Nominated for : The Musical Composition Prize 2021
The form of this piece — musical meditation for poetic silence — is freely inspired by the meeting of divergent trajectories, one moving towards effacement, the other towards light.
The first corresponds to the travels of Arthur Rimbaud after 1875, throughout Europe, then Africa (Hamburg, Milan, Cyprus, Stockholm, Aden, Harare, etc) after having definitively stopped writing poetry, until his death in Marseille in 1891.
The contrasting character of the musical episodes coincides with that of the different places he visited, while the instrumental space, articulations, recurrence of certain situations have been deduced from these eventful explorations.
The second, more secretive, trajectory is linked to the progressive recognition of this poetic work. It began in his lifetime, starting in 1881, and developed unbeknownst to him, when Paul Verlaine gathered several of his former companion’s manuscripts to publish them.
Thus, several poems from Rimbaud’s Illuminationsappear as phantoms, emerging from sonic matter to become intelligible words — and the body of poetry retrieves its true body.
Le Lieu et la Formule is dedicated to Matthias Pintscher and the Ensemble intercontemporain.