Spenta Mainyu

Spenta Mainyu is inspired by a central concept of Zoroastrianism, sometimes identified with Ahura Mazda, the “Wise Lord” or “Supreme God,” appearing as one of his appellations, sometimes distinguished and translated as “Liberating Spirit” or “Holy Spirit.” In this sense, it designates the divine faculty of continuous creation. The concept refers to a complex spiritual idea: the inspiration that guides us and the intuition that enlightens us, but also the spark of divine light that each of us carries within ourselves, and likewise contained in plants, animals, and certain objects. For Zoroastrians, it manifests itself in particular through fire, which they worship for this reason.
The piece is part of this symbolic and spiritual momentum. It draws its energy from a tension between the material reality of the instrument and the desire to transcend its constraints. Incandescence is the vital condition of Spenta Mainyu, and a certain urgency runs through the writing: the texture becomes dense, as if it needed to speak with a multitude of voices impossible to render simultaneously, the single line diffracting into a complex polyphony.
The work seeks to highlight the intrinsic beauty of the oboe in a paradoxical gesture: working within the precision of the instrument, incorporating its particularities and its real geography, always remaining within the bounds of organic feasibility, while transcending its natural inertia. Each moment is loosened and energized so as to lead toward a cathartic communion, carried by the effervescence of instrumental energy and animated breath.
The piece unfolds as a vast virtuoso deployment of the oboe that constantly escapes itself, creating an image both tangible and elusive—like an emanation of Spenta Mainyu glimpsed in the ardor of the flame. The writing takes the form of a reinvented ancestral melopoeia, woven from numerous extended techniques grounded in the particularities of the oboe, and especially in certain asymmetries of its construction: ascending glissandi, microtonality, double trills, timbral play with bisbigliandi, “false fingerings” harking back to the instrument before the complex key system, multiphonics, flatterzunge, vibrato produced by moving the instrument, and incandescent passages or incandescent passages pushing the instrument to the brink of tipping over. This avalanche of sounds, this cascade of rockets, can carry a great power—vivifying and original.
The work was initiated by the oboist François Salès, and owes much to the close collaboration with the musician to whom it is dedicated. Sessions of experimentation, recording, and exploration of the instrument’s technical resources nourished the writing and allowed for the invention of new sound combinations in the service of the aesthetic purpose. In a contemporary repertoire that is less abundant for the solo oboe than for the flute or clarinet, Spenta Mainyu aims to contribute to broadening the expressive possibilities of the instrument.

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