Creation : 04 October 1995, Festival Musica, Strasbourg
Composition : 1995
Commanditaire : Ministère de la Culture
Dédicataires : Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Effectif : 6 percussionnistes jouant des peaux
Durée : 10’
Styx (the name of a flow that was once feared, with a six but also the English word styx), a score where a sound – a quasi-noise – vibrating, undulating, running like a flow, will have to go through six situations:
1- Introduction : A continuous sound vibrating in the high register, where we will later know that here Damnation was inaugurated (said G.P. in his novel La disparition).
2- Scissions : The unison oscillating from furtive to noise (fortissimo) until it is divided by six.
3- Ramifications : An abounding course, the plumbing at first constrained by the dominant unison frees itself – more or less lively profiles in three voices, sometimes six – abolishing any milestone, provoking collisions or illusions to end up with a deeper sound, then a jump for a moment but which ends in a blank, a hole.
4- Circumvolutions : Propagation of the sound swirling all around the device (six circles not quite closed), circulations fixing its horizon, showing the end. Climax. Then a throbbing flow weakening until omission… no sound.
5- Coda : End of a course then lowering to the lowest point, imitations, stratifications too, but always without figurations (not a rhythm in the composition).
6- Post-scriptum : A start forming a motif? No, a final point.
Claudy Malherbe, June 1995.