Ensemble

What I sought in all musical expression through the sublimation of the instrumental gesture (and its reverse) is found, taken to its poetic extreme of contradiction in the orchestra: the orchestra is...

Vermeer's Woman in blue reading a letter [La Liseuse] is not only a depiction of life in Holland in the 17th century, but also has deeply metaphysical elements in it - a tribute to inner nature, memor...

In the mind of a composer, the concept of method is pivotal. At the beginning of this work, an opening figure provides the initial presentation of musical material that will, after a pause, be taken u...

What fascinates me in Schubert's lieder, more even than the unusually creative melodic lines, is the number of piano accompaniment patterns (or Formel in German). These repetitive elements often conve...

Orchestra. Instrumentation: 2(2picc&flA&flB).1(ca).2(2clB).1(Cbn) / 1.2(trpB).2(trbA).0 / 2perc / 2pno / acdn / hp / 3.2.2.1(à 5 cordes)

Does speed in music help precision? Does it sweep away any question? Would it not be akin to a silence resulting from centrifugal forces? I have long wondered whether speed participated in erasure or...

To begin with: a desire for lightness, flexibility, versatility, the preoccupation with avoiding grandiloquence and rhetorical effects as much as possible.Few violent and forthright contours, but rath...

It is at once a continuation of Murail's previous explorations and a radically new departure. Whereas most of his previous music relied essentially on continuous transformation of the material, Time a...

Sables returns to certain preoccupations addressed in Altitude 8000, and takes them further: an absence of punctual events (no percussive sounds), extreme continuity (no silence, aside from the beginn...

Time Stretch (on Gesualdo) takes as its starting point Gesualdo's S'io non miro non moro from Book 5 of the Madrigals. From this short piece for five voices I derived a harmonic tapestry of 130 chords...

Commissioned by the Pelléas Chamber Orchestra and its conductor Benjamin Levy in 2006, Lumen II is similar to its older sister Lumen, composed 5 years earlier, in its quest for luminosity, but leans i...

Gris Cendre is based on Samuel Beckett's text Lessness, which Ludovic Janvier, with the author's permission, translated as the word 'Sans' (Lessness). No other translation for the word he coined in En...

By the greatest fluke, in 2007 the two principal European orchestral conducting competitions proposed that I write an original work, which would be a requirement for the candidates. Finding the coinci...

Contes cruels for two electric guitars and orchestra is not a double concerto per se: the guitars are stealthy intruders within the orchestra and give the cruel tales an unusual colour. The second gui...