“This new orchestral piece is a way for me to outline new sound interests in my musical career. My deeply European artistic and genetic identity has always been curious of other cultures (especially those of north and south America) and I wish to bring together two parallel worlds that I have been able to study and practise separately.
In this piece, some recurring sources of inspiration in my work – such as Russian or eastern European composers, 20th century French music, or American minimalists – are associated with hints of rhythms that are more traditionally anchored in Spanish or eastern European music where the dance-rhythm is an integral part of their language and popular culture.
As an improvisational pianist, and because of my musical path wound up in jazz with its diverse cultural mix over the years, rhythm and pulse have always been at the heart of my research. The rhythmic language of all types of music of African-American tradition has an energy and a dialectic that is different from that of European musical styles and the history that has shaped them for centuries. Thus, the 6/8 rhythm opens the piece with a very fast, repeated note for several bars, a note and pulse around which the different thematic elements emerge one by one; this rhythm allows for an immediate plunge into something very vivacious and in a constant state of effervescence, and the juxtaposition with the 3/4 rhythm creates a sort of hiatus which has allowed me to reach sounds and tones common to those two initially different worlds. It is an attempt at opening the border that separates them without straying too much from my own melodic and harmonic obsessions, my perpetual guiding thread.
This piece is constructed in a very dynamic form, in one breath, full of agitation and turbulence just as I like it – without conforming to the sacrosanct central “adagio” breathing, for which I sought more poetic colours by juxtaposing them like mirrors that would reflect each other's images and play with their perception so as to instil a constantly renewed sense of movement and vitality.”
Baptiste TROTIGNON, décembre 2017
Instrumentation
2 flutes (piccolo) - 2 oboes - 2 clarinets in B flat (bass clarinet) - 2 bassoons / 4 horns in F - 3 trumpets in C - 3 trombones (2 tenors, 1 bass) / timpani / 2 percussions / celesta / strings
15 March 2018, Paris, Auditorium de Radio France
Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio-France
Conducting, Marzena Diakun
Commission by Musique nouvelle en liberté
Broadcast live on France Musique
http://www.baptistetrotignon.com/