Transir (Paralyse)

Creation : 28/08/2005, Royaumont Abbey
Music and conception : Michaël Levinas
Number of musicians : 6 percussionists
Duration : 16 mn

This piece has been written to pay a tribute to Fausto Romitelli. It develops what I call alteration and paradoxal polyphonies.

1) From the alteration of scales and of Doppler Effect in "PARALYSE". It is about modal scales which evolve by progressive alteration. This slow alteration principle is inspired from Doppler Effect.

It also expresses the essence of temporality, which is the origin of the perception of the form of PARALYSE. (we learn from here that beyond ethno-musicology reference this alteration phenomenon of scales in Bartok’s works, although sonata remains his formal reference).

2) The paradoxal polyphonies

In PARALYSE, scales are played with separate intervals (the movment following the interval of the third becomes a tenth and so on) which create "contrasted diagonal" polyphonic lines. The writing of these paradoxal polyphonies develop a certain style in me, in my string quintet Enlaced Letters II. It triggers a paradoxal perception and psycho-acoustic of steep movements between the musical ranges.

This polyphony that infringes the "traditional waterproofness" of musical ranges consist some "gyratory beams" which are at the same time harmonic and polyphonic.

I started to build this writing style and to conceive this self-generating style between polyphony and "harmonic" out of my more instrumental works : "Rebounds" and "Beyond" (1992 and 1994)

In this concept of alteration and of polyphony, there is a relation "restructure" of parameters between them, and (for me) it is like an open window of new style on a new tone towards new imaginary.

3) Trance and process

My tribute to Fausto Romitelli should evoke all these past months of nightly telephone talks, while I was composing the overture of "Nègres", and was sworking on Ligeti’s etudes and Bach’s "The Well-Tempered Clavier" for my coming recording at UNIVERSAL.

Together, we mentionned the feeling of "trance" but also the limits of the too rigorous spectral process, as well as the limit of "temporal limits" in Ligeti’s etudes. We used to say that the ending of hhis works were often too disappointing. But what is the reason of this slightly sad inflexion ?

It is because of this kind of exchanges, far from institutional pressures, that I got part of my energy back so that I managed to conceive "the altered scales’ definite time" and the interlacing letters as well as the paradoxal dizziness of the polyphonic-harmonic sonority : a real open window to my composing.

If in the overture of "Nègres", polyphony is strictly harmonic on a rythmic basis, then hitting the keyboards in "PARALYSE" would allow to introduce the procedure of altering the scales, the disynchronization and a strange imitation (within this disynchronization) between harmony and disharmony.

It would be about a polyphonic imitation between the tempered sonority and its noisy imitation. Another modality of alteration.

I don’t stop thinking about the night dialogues I had with Fausto, within Sanary, Paris, Milan, Gorizia. Trance, he used to say, "transir" (paralyse) also meant to die in French in XVI century.

Michaël Levinas