Back to catalogue
LES 12 LUNES DU SERPENT : PRINTEMPS(Opus 82A)
April 200115'Mixed music
Aperçu partitionNotice
In 2000, Les Percussions de Strasbourg invited me to take part in a collaborative project with Taiwan’s Ju Percussion Group, and I immediately accepted. During a trip to Taiwan in February 2001, we defined the terms of this Franco-Chinese collaboration: one hour of concert, half of which would be given to a Frenchman, and the other half to a Chinese woman, Chien Hui-Hung. As we were in the Year of the Serpent, and the project involved 12 musicians, I came up with the idea of calling it Les 12 lunes du serpent. Two seasons – or six “moons” – were assigned to each composer, and for my part I opted for spring and autumn, which can also be played as stand-alone pieces.
[Read further]
Le printemps du serpent continues the work on natural sounds I began in the early ’70s, but goes even further in its meticulous transcription, choosing the sounds associated with spring. The challenge of notating rain drop by drop, and animal songs phoneme by phoneme, has been met, resulting in a total fusion of recordings and instrumental writing.
L’automne du serpent departs from the precise, extreme naturalism of the other season, to draw more abstract inspiration from a certain global vision of autumn. It is not the Romantic season, with its dark exaltation and the threatening intrusion of death, that colors this music, but rather a fulfillment analogous to that evoked by Antiquity: the abundant opulence of fruit, and a gradually calming euphoria.
L’automne du serpent departs from the precise, extreme naturalism of the other season, to draw more abstract inspiration from a certain global vision of autumn. It is not the Romantic season, with its dark exaltation and the threatening intrusion of death, that colors this music, but rather a fulfillment analogous to that evoked by Antiquity: the abundant opulence of fruit, and a gradually calming euphoria.
Instrumentation
12 percussionists, including 2 pianistsFirst performance
12.1.2001 Grenoble Percussions de Strasbourg & Ju percussion group
