Amorces – Éclipse

The health crisis that we have been experiencing for a year and a half now has had a significant impact on my compositional work. After the stupefaction of the first confinement, with the impossibility of writing a note of music with the exception of the nightmarish miniature Frousse (2020), I now realize that the works composed since then have all had recourse to an external substratum – Vincent Dulom’s painting for my second string quartet Brèches (2020), Annie Ernaux’s letter for the music-fiction l’Autre fille (2020) or the correspondence between Albert Camus and Maria Casarès for Fragments d’autre (2021). So, to celebrate and honor the Del Duca Foundation’s commissioning prize, I wanted to confront myself with a work of “pure music”, or rather, a work with no references to other disciplines and no use of Aesthetically Modified Objects (AMO) from past or pre-existing music. To return, in itself, to an austere compositional exercise of putting in tension between form and material. But the return to an uncertain health situation at the time of writing, prolonged my concerns and tended to nullify all forms of musical development in my sketches, the very idea of projection being called into question as the virus mutated. It is this particular situation, the only one possible in its current state, that I am trying to set to music in this work. By contrasting a succession of primers – embodied in the repetition of a sound object consisting of beats produced by the microtonal accordion, with a gradual freezing of the strings within the orchestra – which suggests a phenomenon of eclipse, I open up a gap between two representations of our troubled times. Through this gap, the snippets of a better world may take shape, metaphorized here by an ecology of sound, mineral and minimal.
Aurélien Dumont