Gerard Pesson

Quatuor à cordes No. 2 Bitume

Bitume (Sérénade chevauchée) Bitumen (Overlapping Serenade) The pinhole camera is the most basic camera. A tightly closed box acts as a camera oscura, with a small hole to let the light in. The real image is inverted, due to the absence of focus, and fixed on photosensitive paper, thus reproducing the actual system of eyesight. The smallness of the light opening allows for an almost infinite depth of field. It requires, or rather permits, very long exposures. Not hundredths of seconds, but minutes, hours, weeks, or even years.This extreme length of exposure and pin of light are the handwriting of time. They relate invention. They are the subject of this music which I have been contemplating for nearly ten years - the minimum time if one is to encourage the movers and of course for all of the figures to be deposited onto the Bitumen of Judea. Thus every 'impression' can evolve toward its complexity. According to optical law, outside becomes inside, but inverted. The music slides toward an accelerated serenade, repeated indefinitely, upset by 'brutalistic' treatment, hurled with forced marches across the panorama, finally revealed on the cantilena nakedness that outlines the vanishing point of this gallop.The slowness of 'researching', as Philippe Beck says, turns the researcher into the researched. He himself becomes photo sensitive and sees himself forced, without arrogance, but not without presumptuousness, to apply the known principle to himself: Orderly overlapping begins with one's self.