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Comment
Rituel d’oubli (1968), Rituel pour les mangeurs d’ombre (1979) and Lèthè (1985) all bear witness to a persistent theme in my imagination, that of memory and forgetting. It lies at the heart of musical perception, which is constructed by grasping a present of a few seconds, by understanding a form of several minutes, and by remembering in the background a cultural history, but which has an equal need for oblivion. As René Char wrote: “How can we move forward without a stranger in front of us? The twentieth century has sometimes pushed this concern to the point of the impossible undertaking of a clean slate.
The cello is part of my personal memory, linked to my early childhood. My father, a cellist, even introduced me to it for a year when I was eight, but without much success. Three months after Lèthè, the river of forgetfulness, it’s the path of memory that leads to the necessary balance between the two constituents of psychic life.
The Kurzweil 250 is also no more than a memory. Like most computer music instruments, it was destined for a short life, cut short by technological progress and, above all, by the greed of its distributors. Today, we know that digital culture risks leaving no trace in the not-too-distant future. The successive mediums of stone, papyrus or parchment, paper, then digital, have led to a world where the preservation of writing will become problematic, and where collective memory may ultimately be increasingly reduced to oral transmission. The problem is that we have long since lost the art of this transmission, that it would be difficult to recover it, and that all electroacoustic music would be irretrievable.
ITER MEMOR(Opus 53)
June 198518'Chamber music
Aperçu partitionNotice
Iter memor literally means “memory path”. The work was commissioned by Radio-France, and written for cello and Kurzweil 250 digital keyboard (it can also be played on a sampler).
Memory is not nostalgia. Without it, there is no psychic coherence; and without its opposite, oblivion, there is no taste for life. Music lives this double necessity with acuity.
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Comment
Rituel d’oubli (1968), Rituel pour les mangeurs d’ombre (1979) and Lèthè (1985) all bear witness to a persistent theme in my imagination, that of memory and forgetting. It lies at the heart of musical perception, which is constructed by grasping a present of a few seconds, by understanding a form of several minutes, and by remembering in the background a cultural history, but which has an equal need for oblivion. As René Char wrote: “How can we move forward without a stranger in front of us? The twentieth century has sometimes pushed this concern to the point of the impossible undertaking of a clean slate.
The cello is part of my personal memory, linked to my early childhood. My father, a cellist, even introduced me to it for a year when I was eight, but without much success. Three months after Lèthè, the river of forgetfulness, it’s the path of memory that leads to the necessary balance between the two constituents of psychic life.
The Kurzweil 250 is also no more than a memory. Like most computer music instruments, it was destined for a short life, cut short by technological progress and, above all, by the greed of its distributors. Today, we know that digital culture risks leaving no trace in the not-too-distant future. The successive mediums of stone, papyrus or parchment, paper, then digital, have led to a world where the preservation of writing will become problematic, and where collective memory may ultimately be increasingly reduced to oral transmission. The problem is that we have long since lost the art of this transmission, that it would be difficult to recover it, and that all electroacoustic music would be irretrievable.
Instrumentation
Cello and samplerFirst performance
11/12/85 Paris, Radio-France, studio 103 (Martine Joste et Alain Meunier)
Publisher
DurandCommissioned by
Radio-FranceDedicated to
Records
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