UGARIT

Comment
The title of the work corresponds to a city on the Syrian coast whose ruins I visited on December 30, 1998, and where the oldest known alphabetic script was discovered. But the piece’s “archaeological” inspiration is limited to the title’s anagram. The idea for the work itself came to me while listening to a traditional Venezuelan piece, Registro del pajarillo, played on the cuatro by Cheo Hurtado. What fascinated me about this highly virtuosic piece was its extraordinarily successful synthesis of traditional guitar-playing clichés and the bird model explicitly evoked by the title. In Europe, it is perhaps the progné nightingale that best represents the rhythmic traits present in this piece: tight repetitions of sounds (rendered by rasgueados), a fixed link between tempo and timbre, with sudden unpredictable shifts from one series to another, and a diversity of timbres, some of which evoke percussion.
I wanted to take up these features without using tonal clichés. This meant that I first had to search for the fingerings on a guitar that would allow for the uncharted aggregates used as complex timbres. But, not being a guitarist myself, I was fortunate to find in Thierry Mercier a virtuoso who not only proved capable of stringing together very complex fingerings, but also suggested certain possibilities to complete the desired effects. I remembered what Ohana had told me about the particular difficulty presented by guitar technique as soon as you deviated from the routines. Six years after this revelation of a recording, I was invited three times to Venezuela, where Gustavo Dudamel was conducting La peau du silence, to verify the exceptional vitality of music in that country, whether learned or popular.
The evolution of Ugarit runs counter to that of most solo pieces: instead of yielding to increasing rhythmic animation, it is gradually invaded by silences, like so many hesitations or doubts.