Creation : 1999, Musica, Strasbourg, France
Duration : 13′
Musicians : 6 percussionists
Workforce: 6 percussionists “Under the formal conception of a language “guided” by my interest in semiotics (semiology of the musical gesture), renewed from a cognitive point of view, this music explodes and a burst of strength emerges from it. From this burst a path opens up throughout the work through the evolution of the sign and the relationship between the signs inside and outside of themselves.
Semiotics is my discourse in this piece and the process, whose cycle is the sign, is the syntax.
This work is an illustration of a “world” coordinated by its own contradiction.
Chaotic, violent, blind and stupid contradiction, conscious and unconsciously guilty of the degeneration of musical material and language, where the results of the relations between signs become truths by its own force.
The title does not express a programmatic intention, but it gives me the energetic support to “exhale”, with the strength of the timbre, the amplitude and the rhythm that the percussion can offer me, all my discontent. These beautiful elements, absorbed into the cyclical process that is itself the twisted element, thus participate in all the efforts leading to mutations, false solutions and “pretty little banal things”.
Then there is nothing to do, nothing but wait for the end, any end, but quickly, an end.
Mental underdevelopment; Homage to my Country: the musical aspects, mixed with the cyclical aspects, emerge from a “virtuoso” writing that forces the performers to be accomplices of the complexity, to give the piece the appearance of a logical flow of material. I manipulate this material with a cause-and-effect technique, where nothing happens without a consequence and all consequences become causes again.
This reflects my thinking and this is how I conceive of the major tool with which I ‘build my art’.”
Harold Vasquez Castaneda