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In 2010 while waiting for the first rehearsals of a concert in Sao Paulo (Brazil) in my hotel room, I found myself with several days of free time. With no piano, computer or music paper, I started experimenting totally silent vocal emissions of an improvised text, pronouncing it in an extremely detailed way, spelling it out but avoiding the vibration of my vocal cords.
During the silent enunciation of a text, tiny sounds occur inside the mouth itself, lips clash, the tongue hits the back of the teeth and palate, it slams against its inner parts, the whistling sounds are modulated by the shape of the tongue, they pass between the teeth, resonate inside the mouth, are interrupted by a occlusive consonant. In the concentrated listening to these minimal sounds - breaths, gasps, hisses, murmurs, frictions, whispers, spasms - a musical intimacy of a particular sensuality is established, linked to their evocative power. All this takes place in an infinitesimal musical scale.
The idea of composing a cycle came after composing Lips, your lips for voice and electronics (2010), approaching the same scale of sound in a piece for alto flute, voice and electronics, Keep your furies (2012). Later, Air lié (2013) for flute and electronics, Traum-Entelechiæ for voice, alto flute, harp and electronics (2016) and Fall, love letters fragments (2017) for voice, harp and electronics extended and completed the cycle.
The project of involving the listener as much as possible in his listening relationship with each piece, the idea of touching it, of crossing it with sound, is not foreign to the central theme of the cycle. The spatialization of electronics also seeks to materialize this objective.
The electronic parts were made from the materials present in the scores. They were recorded in the studio, mainly by Isabel Soccoja, Nicolas Vallette and Élodie Reibaud. Electronics extends the score itself and extends the capabilities of the voice and instruments, endowing them with technical and musical attributes that they do not naturally possess. It also expands the sound space of each piece through its quadraphonic projection (in stereo in this recording).
This CD takes up the live presentation of the cycle: acoustic miniatures separate the instrumental pieces to refocus the listening on a concentrated, minimal scale before it can be redeployed in the next piece.
The texts of the various pieces have a strong evocative power in a variety of ways. In Lips, your lips is deconstructed, fractionated and recurrently evokes the transmission of meaning through the mouth, tongue, lips and finally through speech and song. The subject of Keep Your Furies’ text is the manifestation of a mental state conditioned by emotional hypersensitivity and its narcissistic projection on others. Some dimensions related to perception are the subject of G. W. Leibniz’s texts used in Traum-Entelechiæ. Finally, excerpts from the correspondence between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West feed Fall, love letters fragments, the conclusion of the cycle inhabited by the sensuality of amorous feeling and the desire it provokes or justifies.
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