KASSANDRA

Notice

The mythical figure of Cassandra, to whom the work is dedicated, does not herald a work with a program. Cassandra, far from representing some malevolent witch, embodies the passionate source of all lucidity: having received the gift of clairvoyance from Apollo, she refused to give herself to the god as agreed, and he condemned her never to be believed, while announcing the truth about the future. Thus her lucidity, instead of being attuned to the joy of union with the spiritual sun (Apollo), will be the obligatory companion of suffering.
These very general references apply to a work comprising ten sequences that follow one another like a kind of dreamlike ritual from shadow to final light, and in which the fusion between natural and cultural elements is as intimate as possible.
At the same time, since Kassandra’s city of Troy was the point of contact between East and West, the timbres used also seek this fusion of sound images from diverse sources. Indian shanai, Arab zummara, crumhorns, bombards and racketts from the Middle Ages, whispered voices in Amharic, Basque, Fijian, Georgian, ancient Greek, Amhara, Telugu and Tibetan, mingle with the more familiar instruments of our own tradition. The sequence is sometimes based on formal analogies, such as between the nasal tones of reeds and the buzzing of bees, and sometimes on analogies that are more symbolic than logical, like the “free associations” of daydreaming.