VOLIÈRE

Notice

The work brings together four African birds in an imaginary aviary, alternating with two Europeans and an Asian. They are successively a podobed agrobat, a skylark, a Senegal coucal, an icterine hypolais, a second podobed agrobat, a Malaysian shama with whom I had lived for several years, and a snow-capped cossyphe. I simply sought to highlight their musical talents, for example by doubling them with a piano (agrobate, hypolais), a xylophone (lark) or a flute (coucal). The last two (shama and cossyphe) have songs of such diversity that I have tried to emphasise it by hybridising each of them with several Midi instrument timbres. This continuous instrumental veneer sometimes gives way to the outline of a dialogue, but it is the bird that, out of politeness, I have allowed to speak most of the time.