L'ESTUAIRE DU TEMPS - François-Bernard Mâche

L’ESTUAIRE DU TEMPS(Opus 71)

March 199329'Orchestral

orchestre Philharmonique dir. E.Howarth soloist Michael Levinas

Notice

L’estuaire du temps is a kind of concerto for sampler and orchestra, commissioned by Radio-France for the Festival Musica 1993 and dedicated to the sculptor Françoise Cataláa. It was premiered on September 17, 1993 by the Radio-France Philharmonic Orchestra at the Palais des Congrès in Strasbourg, under the direction of E. Howarth.
The work has some of the traditional features of a concerto, such as the occasional dialogue between the soloist and the orchestra, and its organization into three linked movements. But the sampler, even when deliberately treated as an instrument, has some very untraditional features. Sometimes it transmits the voice of the elements (surf, wind) or human languages (Lithuanian, Russian, ancient Armenian, Batak, Malay, Javanese, Xhosa, imaginary languages), sometimes instrumental or synthetic sounds. He thus embraces almost all currently known sound sources.

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Faithful to research directions sometimes followed for a very long time, I have orchestrated spoken models, endowing each language with a particular alliance of timbres. Remembering a recording I made in May 1973 with the poet A.Voznessenski, when Antoine Vitez and I conceived a dramatico-musical project that never came to fruition, I have incorporated the voice of this great Russian poet among others, as a brief tribute. Isn’t Russia the homeland of the zaum, one of the first experiments in sound poetry? Also in line with the spectrographic models explored, for example, in Le son d’une voix in 1964, I have sometimes written the orchestra as the amplification of sound structures whose source the sampler simultaneously delivers.
But more than these particularities of writing, as the title suggests, I have devoted myself to dreaming about what is perhaps the essential project of all music worthy of the name: the meeting of time and eternity. The estuary is the place where not only “time overflows”, as Eluard put it, but where the sea invests the river. The encounter between a narrative form – the course of the river – and the immutable depth – the ocean – is the true theme of the work. Thirty years ago, La peau du silence saw music as a caress; l’estuaire du temps invites us instead to encounter the tidal bore. Exploring a boundary in both cases. Or crossing it?