NUIT BLANCHE

Notice

The work was composed in August 1966 at the Studio Expérimental de la Radiodiffusion Polonaise, to which its founder, Mr Patkowski, had invited me. The narrator, accompanied by a magnetic tape, performs a text by Antonin Artaud, entitled Tutuguri, taken from his collection Voyage au pays des Tarahumaras. The text is dated 16 February 1948, and was therefore written by Artaud three weeks before his death. It was the vehemence of the style and a certain tone of voice that first struck me. Artaud uttered this superb prose poem as a final protest against the great night of the world, and as a last cry of nostalgia for the solar illumination he thought he had seen on his 1936 trip to Mexico.
Clearly, a text like this can do without music, as any great poetic text can, and the music it evokes does not need to be embodied in sound. But we know that Artaud always called for music, that he dreamt of electroacoustic sounds and the revolution they have brought about in our listening. I took advantage of this general affinity to accompany the poem, renewing the traditional and minor genre of melodrama, or recitation accompanied by music.
At the premiere at the Warsaw Autumn Festival on 18 September 1966, the text translated into Polish was spoken by A.Łapicki. The French premiere was given by Alain Cuny on 2 May 1967 in a Radio-France studio in Paris.