Creation : 27 September 1988 at Festival Musica (Strasbourg, France)
Commissioner : Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication
Dedcated to : Percussions de Strasbourg
Musicians: 6 percussionists
Duration: 11′
Isn’t percussion the appointed companion of European music? As a companion, it became independent in the 20th century. Ambiguous autonomy. What do we hear in percussion alone? Certainly, all the combinatory richness that is signified by the percussive confinement – as a kind of “abstract” music, an understatement of the musical – but also the euphoria and the sonorous spontaneity of a language that was born in the influence of the first concrete music invented in the studio. We have also witnessed an inflation of particular instruments from non-European cultures. This irruption of percussion in contemporary music confirmed the evolution of several centuries of Western writing, and the liberation of a material apparently too often limited to the role of a rhythm machine, cluttered with memories of virile marches and folklore. Today, however, the progressive mastery of sound through technology might perhaps lead us to reconsider the role of this instrumentarium. How can we apprehend the raw material of instruments often created in musical civilisations that are not based on the thought of writing? Used for their own sake, these instruments also signify the limit of a fundamentally non-Western material, i.e. conceived without any combinatorial technique. This is perhaps the irreducible difference between a violin and a piano on the one hand, and a Balinese gong on the other. Whatever the harmonic richness of this gong, its “malleability” is inherently limited. Unless the sonic virtualities of this gong are made explicit by an orchestra. But isn’t there precisely in this raw material offered to composers new ways of exploring the vibration of matter that would no longer be confined to striking? In Voûtes, I worked on the idea of the brilliance of copper caused by swirling falls on reflective surfaces. This is a study of new transients of unrestricted percussive attacks. Moreover, because of its limited character, percussion expresses beyond percussion: what could be called the enigma of sound. Thus the chûue, the brilliance of the brass in the resonance of a vault evokes in me – by acoustic understatement – the brilliance of the voice and laughter. This brass orchestration is supported on the pedal by large Chinese vases that set snare drums vibrating, by sympathy on very precise frequencies. From then on, I rediscover the privilege of the “percussion” material, the interference of one sound body on another, the phenomenon of a shaking and the evocation of breath. Throughout this work, these new transients of attack become like structures of development. The result is a continuous variation on three modes (three short pieces: Copper twirl = sobbing, arching, pulverizing) obtained by the controlled use of metal diameters, characteristics of reflective surfaces, resonance times and speeds of circular chutes. Rhythmic polyphony is no longer limited to scanning. With Voûtes I attempt new writings of “faire-sonner”.
Michaël Levinas, Août 1988