Creation : 08/09/2007, Royaumont Abbey
Music and conception : Gérard Pesson
Number of musicians : 6 percussionists
Duration : 14 mn
Ur Timon is a sort of concerto in which each one of the soloists successively comes to the centre of the set whilst the other five make up what used to be called the ripieno in the Baroque period.
This Chandelle game, or Furet*, is applied to a ritual of sounds, in that Ur-timon is performed in a ring in the middle of which both the soloist and his work bench / altar are the focal point. For all that, those soli are no virtuosi. They rather stand for this small theatre of sounds and its circulation where each one, often miscast, enters in turn and speaks according to what he specializes in.
Here the percussion uses only a small part of the impressive material provided for by the 20th Century. The small puppet staged concerto rings the bell for global warming (which happened to be the first title of the piece) at the very moment when there is nothing left- the sounds themselves in the first place – to be either sorted out or thrown away. On the contrary, as music makes its way towards childlike constructions where all can sound, where everything can be cast for the part of the orchestra (plastic bottles, glass, rusks, rubber bands, bird-organs, toys, hunting bird calls, Kway, scratch, etc.), it is definitely poverty that is required. In this recycling workshop, the line between what is most dreamt about and what is most laughed at is never really clear-cut. In that sense, Ur-timon is also a role play.
Ur-timon falls into tableaux and playlets which would tell the story of a Noah’s Ark of the sound as if used like a glove puppet. Marches, fanfares, chimes or other conductus mark each time a soloist walks towards his work bench. Along the lines of some progressive dramatic art dealing with the transformation of elements, each movement of the concerto is devoted to a material which becomes, following the examples of Dante’s Inferno or Sade’s Days of Sodom, a circle as being a step in an initiation.
The title not only refers to the Sumerian city of Ur, today in Iraq near Bassorah, which was believed to be Abraham’s town, according to the book of Genesis, but also to the German prefix which, even though there is no etymological link, means the origin. For the sound makers – the composer as well as the instrumentalists – there is nothing more poignant as this timbre works which seems to keep echoing this breathtaking precedence. The timon in question refers to the soloist as he conducts this ritual, or even better, as he calls the tune.
A motive for this sonorous game of furet is required (“the itchy palm” could also be an ideal subtitle). It could be: more reliability in frailty and miscasting as much as possible.
Gérard Pesson (translated by J-C Beaumont) May 2007
*The Furet (also called the Chandelle) is a French traditional children’s party game. The equivalent would be “Drop the Handkerchief” or “Pass the Slipper”. [1] A “Timon” in French is a shaft or a beam.