CLOSE ISLANDS

Close Islands was conceived for 5 orchestra groups, each one with its own characteristic register, or timbre, and playing style. The work appears as the opening of a cycle, a lyric theatrical pentalogy that proceeds in successive stages towards a possible visualization, a theatralization, a production of the texts presented.

The first part, the overture, proposes a series of material to be used throughout the cycle, but in a new light. The division in groups is meant to constantly personalize the material throughout the work. The set of themes of Close Islands reflects the fragmentation of events whose resources are only partially explored.

Spatialization makes the themes more obvious inasmuch as the individuality of each group is perceived as an « Island » before (or after) having participated in a global action.
This is an idea I had already previously developed: isolation of sound sources, construction of a global nature ( Multisources ), mutation of brute material, defined as somehow out of time, in the course of permanent development (Transmutations ).

As to the relations between the different « Iles », I refer to Spinoza’s axiom « on the nature and the origin of spirit » , which describes in general terms the affectations of one body by an other : « All the ways in which one body is affected by another depends on the nature of the body affected, as well as on the nature of the body that affects ; so that one and the same body is moved in different ways depending on the different nature of the bodies that move it, and oppositely, different bodies are moved in different ways by one and the same body ».

This axiom expresses the possible multiplicity created by a situation that maintains norms of reciprocity between its terms. Musical and theatrical situations are often conceived no differently.

Denis Cohen