Creation: 30 September 1988, Italie, Turin, Italy, Turin, festival Eco Narciso, by les Percussions de Strasbourg, direction : Olivier Dejours (creation of Clivages I at the Festival Musica de Strasbourg on September 29th 1987)
Commissioner: Fondation Gulbenkian
Musicians: 6 percussionists
Duration: 40′
Publishing: Ricordi, München, nº Sy 3037
This piece was commissioned by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. The first part of Clivages was premiered on 29 September 1987 at the Musica festival in Strasbourg for the 25th anniversary of the Percussions de Strasbourg. The second part was premiered on 30 September 1988 at the Eco Narciso Festival in Turin, performed again by the Percussions de Strasbourg under the direction of Olivier Dejours. Clivages pour six percussions is a piece made up of two parts, which are performed in uninterrupted succession. If one considers the instruments used in these two parts, one immediately grasps the fundamental differences between them: the first uses exclusively instruments with a “determined sound”; to these are added, in the second, instruments with an “indeterminate sound” which, despite the strong presence of their rather absorbing timbre, acquire a syntactic function in the discourse. This means that the inharmonic (or even noisy) component of the timbres is integrated into the overall melodic and harmonic relationships present, without destroying them. Especially in the second part, we will notice how the timbres of the different percussion instruments manage to surpass their simple individual physical-acoustic presence (as timbre information allowing the identification of their instrumental origin), becoming elements of a coherent musical language, through the use of these same sound qualities, which are attributed functions equivalent to those of vocables, syllables, consonants, vowels, etc.., in a language. Organised afterwards into “words”, “phrases”, etc., these elements acquire a musical meaning in the course of speech, which goes beyond their individual acoustic existence, just as, in spoken language, different combinations of the same sounds (vowels, consonants, syllables, etc.) can exteriorise different semantic contents (depending on the specific grouping of these sounds, the context, the intonation, etc.). These contents go far beyond the pure and simple addition of all that was already “implied” in the individual sounds present. It would still be interesting to consider this “problematic” from the perspective of Sound and the Word, a system of communicating vessels between two opposing forces, the dynamic extremes of the same reality: the desire of Sound to rise to the category of Word, and the tendency of the Word to return (or always to refer) to its origins as Sound, to its “carnal” element, the indispensable vehicle of the Word itself (…). In this sense, in Clivages it is Sound – or rather the most primitive, rough and a priori remote types of sounds with a possibility of Verbal/Vocal exteriorisation – that rises to reach the dimensions of the Verb and the coherence of an autonomous language, capable of exteriorising a wide range of different contents in the form of a musical discourse. However, it is not a question of trying to “imitate” the spoken language with the help of “words set to music”, or to express one’s own meanings, but only to create one’s own sound elements, as well as to affirm musical ideas by using the expressive potential of the language in presence.
João Rafael, Agora 2000.