AND (amnesia 4)

for 16 voices
[2012] dur. 15′ ca.

Commission from the French Ministry of Culture for the Fondation Royaumont
written for Geoffroy Jourdain and Les Cris de Paris

AND is the result of my personal reflection on the concept of eternity and on the idea of sacred which I wanted to imagine in the temple of our body (Non est in toto sanctior orbe locus / there is no holiest place in the world).

The words that Lewis Carroll make the King pronounce by Alice in the paradoxical trial of “Alice’s adventures in wonderland”, sum up our need to reduce life at a linear process with a beginning and an end, birth and death.
On the other hand, the stem cells (as well as the germ cells) represent for me a powerful example which contradicts this linearity. Their constant renewal, their endless repetition, through complex processes of replication and differentiation, contain the memory of organisms that lived thousands of years ago, but whose bodies are now dead.
The texts by Georg Büchner (homage to “Difference and Repetition” by Gilles Deleuze) and Emily Dickinson express this divergent behavior which brings us, in the first case, divided and identical to ourselves every day mortal life, and in the second case, tending towards a unity with everything which surrounds us and before us.

about the amnesia cycle
Without oblivion memory would be oversaturated.
With the pieces of the amnesia cycle, I’m interested in exploring or representing the idea of memory loss, its transformation and / or re-codification.
The five pieces of the cycle have a different instrumental combination with ot without the use of the electronics. They are structured so that repetition – in its medium-form – could work as a reiterated path but each time characterized by different obstacles and interruptions. Their formal approach is similar but what makes the pieces different one from another is the musical (or extra-musical) idea of “forgotten material” and its way of opposing or aiming towards amnesia.

In AND, the surviving fragment is represented by different elements: a chord from the ”Lux Aeterna” by György Ligeti, a micropolyphonic melodic contour used on the Büchner’s text and the “initial hit”, in a contradictory game of death and renewal which finds its eternal dimension in the creativity of memory.

to listen: soundcloud