ETUDE POUR LE POEME

This piece is the third in a cycle of five works for vocals and instruments. The first, Close Islands for five groups, is greater in members ; it serves as an overture and presents material that is used throughout the cycle. The second piece, Sprache, is written for the same parts, but adds four voices/characters and a speaking voice. Both works were performed at the 1990 Strasbourg festival in the final concert version.

L'Etude pour le poème was thus conceived by means of an instrumental reduction at the heart of a pentalogy.
The instrumental distribution follows a model of conjunction-disjunction, a family of timbres-space : 2 groups of identical strings from left to right ; 2 groups of wood and brass, high-low pitch, on the right and on the left ; 1 group of « scansive and resonating » instruments in the centre.

The subtitle alludes to the cycle of events that « turn », while the destination of others is contained in their movement, as in the values of the durations used throughout the work.

The circulation of materials is constrained, under a diktat, filtered by the main identity of each group ; in this sense there is but a partial equivalence of orchestral ideas from one group to another ; no fusional ideality is envisaged in the formal development of the work, but an impossible resolution ; the manner of « being » together of groups in the cycle in general is neither systematically conflictual nor systematically paired, but proceeds rather as the result of individual structural patterns.

The superposed layers of time that structured longer periods in pieces such as Transmutations, Cantate, are segments of aborted speed in the last quarter of the work, whose objective is no longer to propose a performance of Multisources, but to simply leave a trace, as if their original foundation had disappeared.

D. Cohen