As every year, the Musica Festival in Strasbourg offers in its 2018 edition a rich program of talents and varied experiences. Among the many composers presented this month of September, Claude Debussy, Giacinto Scelsi, George Aperghis and François-Bernard Mâche will be delighted to be rediscovered as a matter of urgency. The Festival is also honored with a genuine commitment to creation with two commissions to young artists from our catalogs: François Meïmoun and Francisco Alvarado.

"Since the early hours of Western scholarly musical tradition, writing has focused on the possibilities of restoring memories and reminiscences. The very principle of writing and the concrete traceability of ideas and events on a score makes it an excellent choice, and the composers were quick to exploit these new profits. From the Middle Ages to the present day, the question of remembrance and reminiscence is being refined as the Western musical forms mature and are defined. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, all the great forms that we inherit are based on the principles of memories: the fugue, the rondo, the theme and variations, the sonata form ... The forms made of returns and memories could have offered to the composers the better access to setting the musical dream. And yet, the dream was not the first priority of classical musicians. In the eighteenth century, there are large historical frescoes, sacred texts or some jokes and entertainment. The classic pages devoted to dreams are more lamentations or complaints than a setting to music of the secret workings and mechanisms of the dreams of day and night. The forms of remembrance, rondo or sonata, serve first of all to express the intrigues of the operas of the moment. Nineteenth-century musicians are the first to explore the dream for themselves. Also, classical forms widen, dislocate and merge. The setting to music of the dream does not seem to suffer from any convention. Romantic poets and composers invent new forms. And while Freud publishes his monumental interpretation of dreams, Schönberg plunges into Erwartung's nightmare. The terror of the nightmare, feigned or exacerbated, is at the center of the emancipated music of the classical tone. But what part of a nightmare contains every dream? Where does the dream begin and how far is reality played out? Is life only a dream, and is reality still more immaterial than the residual filter of dreams? Poets and philosophers have plunged into the heart of these concerns more than the musicians. Is the substance of musicians too immaterial to risk dissolving at the approach of dreams? Edgard Poe, better known for his stories than for his poems, has raised the question of doubt that arises from the dream. And here, in this String Quartet, the ancient forms, the fugue and the varied theme, are there to serve this pitfall, to question it and to confront it with our certainties which always separate the reality of the dream. The theme and classic variation offers a succession of faces of a first melody. Here, a second variation is superimposed on a first variation that continues to unfold. No end, no beginning: Machaut and Berg told us that music, of course, does not open or close. It unfolds and moves on. She wants to find, like the dream, with the dream, points of falls and impulse. "

François Meïmoun

“what would I do without this world faceless incurious
where to be lasts but an instant where every instant
spills in the void the ignorance of having been
without this wave where in the end
body and shadow together are engulfed...”

Drawn from Samuel Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, the quote “[…] body and shadow together are engulfed” served as my inspiration for establishing a type of body/shadow relationship at three distinct levels in this piece: the relationship between the bassist and the double bass, between the solo instrument and the ensemble, and between the sound of the bass and the structuring of the musical material through that.

What first interested me about this Beckettian image was that the shadow ceases to be a mere reflection of the body, condemned to follow every gesture dictated to it. In being engulfed together, they find themselves on the same level and seeking to cancel each other out, “spilling in the void”.

I put this idea into practice, especially in my development of the musical material. You could say that the double bass was the body: I was able to extract the notes, harmonic fields, rhythms, and finally, a very rich musical reservoir from which to write part of the ensemble (the shadow). The notion of body/shadow is also present in the management of the density of the instruments in solo, ensemble and tutti moments. Finally, perhaps the most concrete body/shadow relationship is that of the body of the bassist and his instrument.

As this implied choreography unfolds, we may find ourselves asking the question “Who is the body, and who is the shadow? And finally, who swallowed whom?”

Francisco Alvarado

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