Creation : 28 August 2005 at Abbaye de Royaumont
Music and conception : Michaël Levinas
Musicians : 6 percussionists
Duration : 16′
Publishing : Lemoine
This piece written in homage to Fausto Romitelli develops what I call alteration and paradoxical polyphony. 1) Alteration of scales and the Doppler phenomenon in Transir It is about modal scales which evolve by progressive alteration. This principle of slow alteration is inspired by the Doppler phenomenon. It expresses the very essence of temporality which is at the origin of the perception of the TRANSIR form. (beyond the ethno-musicological reference, we can hear this phenomenon of the alteration of scales in Bartok’s work, although the formal reference in his work remains the sonata). 2) The paradoxical polyphonies In Transir, the scales are reinterpreted in multiplications of disjointed intervals (the joint movement of the third becoming a tenth etc.) creating polyphonic lines “in contrasting diagonals”. These paradoxical polyphonies, which develop a writing style initiated, at home, in my string quintet “Lettres enlacées II”, provoke a paradoxical and psycho-acoustic perception of the “steep movements” between registers. This polyphony, which transgresses the “traditional watertightness” of registers and tracks, constitutes “roundabout beams” that are both harmonic and polyphonic. I began to construct this writing and to conceive this auto-genesis between polyphony and “harmonic” from my more strictly instrumental pieces: Rebondset Par delà (1992 and 1994). There is in this conception of alteration and polyphony a “redistribution” of the relationships of the parameters between them, and (for me) an opening of the writing of timbre towards new imaginations. 3) The trance and the process My homage to Fausto Romitelli wants to evoke all those months of nocturnal telephone conversations, while I was writing the overture to The Negroes, and working on the Ligeti studies and The Well-Tempered Keyboard for my recordings at UNIVERSAL. Together we evoked the feeling of “trance”, but also the impasses of the overly rigorous spectral process and the limits of the “time limits” of certain Ligeti studies. “The end of these studies are often disappointing”, we said. “But what is the cause of these somewhat sad endings?” It is in these exchanges, far from institutional pressures, that I found some of my energy to conceive the “formal time of altered scales” and the interlacing of letters as well as the paradoxical vertigo of the polyphonic-harmonic timbre: a true opening of the writing. If in the opening of the Negroes the polyphony is strictly homophonic on the rhythmic level, in Transir the percussion of the keyboards, allows to introduce in the process of altered scales, desynchronization and a strange mimicry (in this desynchronization) between the harmonic and the inharmonic. It would be a polyphonic mimicry between the tempered timbre and its noisy double. Another modality of alteration. I keep thinking of these nocturnal dialogues with Fausto, between Sanary, Paris, Milan, Gorizia. Trance, he said! In the use of 16th century French, transir also meant to die.
Michaël LEVINAS