Creation : 19/01/2002, La Laiterie, Strasbourg
Musicians : 6 percussionists
Duration : 5′
Publishing : Lemoine, Paris, nº 27692
« When one thinks of the Percussions de Strasbourg, one thinks of the imposing instrumentarium, the powerful sound, the unleashing of timbres and rhythms. However, when you work with these six musicians, you are in front of a real chamber music group. Forgetting the hopeless three-hour service, the composer can finally try, correct, transform and search with the percussionists for the right instrument, the right stick, the right attack, the right pulse, the right timbre. This precise work of chamber music is also similar to the rehearsal practice of rock or jazz bands who don’t look at their watch and want to play “together”, which is not always the case in music. It is together, again, that we eat our meals, that we joke at night, late after the concerts, waking up the good sleeping bourgeois with a few well watered “oxen”. Then, when the percussionists of Strasbourg celebrate their fortieth birthday, one is delighted to write and one is ready to interrupt the piece in progress to pay homage to them, all the more so as the work is collective and good friends have taken up the pen. The challenge was to develop each person’s ideas and when Jean-Paul Bernard asked me, almost at the “end of the list”, to start writing, he suggested that I move away from the subject to create a break in this “preliminary agreement”. It was about time and I made a deviation. Only a reminiscence on the snare drum of Martin Matalon’s piece can make the connection with the music that precedes it. But this motif, inserted for a moment and “eaten away” little by little, is also a gap in the time of the piece and changes the way you listen to it. »
Les quarante ans, Écart en temps, écart/ententes. Philippe Hurel