VIGILES

This is not the first time I have combined recordings of natural sounds with a written score that transforms them. I took this risk more than fifty years ago in Rituel d’oubli (hornbill, lion, insects, street fights) and especially in Korwar, which combined a harpsichord with the clicks of Nelson Mandela’s Xhosa language, frogs, a starling, a shama, a guanaco, wild boars, whales and rain. Since then I have tried to deepen my analyses, often replacing the diversity of the original sound zoo with the even more astonishing richness of the inventions of certain animal soloists.
When Thierry Pécou and his ensemble Variances offered me this commission, I jumped at the chance to benefit from their exceptional virtuosity. I had been delighted to discover for several years that they were moving in a direction close to my own, and that their generation was no longer unwilling to show the extent to which the musical life of the animal world shares some essential features with our own. Far from the picturesque or humorous uses to which composers for centuries confined any musical allusion to the sounds of nature, we are now recognising that music itself is the product of natural play, and that art, the eminent activity of the human species, is not its absolute privilege. By recognising the shared values of a few animal voices, we may henceforth foster a more just appreciation of humanity’s status, and a beneficial recognition of the limits of its natural environment and the absurd waste it makes of it. The extermination to which we see so many animal species condemned unfortunately gives the rediscovery of their voices a melancholy echo. The death of languages, like that of insects and birds, is a threat that humanity can partly avert by revising certain pretensions, correcting certain abuses, sacrificing many illusions and remaining vigilant.