In Memoriam
Year 2011
First performance July 5, 2011 (Cambrai)
Instrumentation violin, clarinet, cello
Duration 13’
Score on demand
details
« To those who have left us in this life and will reunite with us in another »
Dedicated to the memory of Michel Hallynck † 03/2011 and Françoise Groben † 05/2011
When my grandmother died, while I was in the United States, I composed Contact 2, subtitled Massspace. I had secretly dedicated it to her, inserting in it a sentence recited in canon: ‘In the memory of a lost one, whose spirit’s unknown particles will be alive forever in the darkness of the cosmos.’ When the Festival Juventus commissioned me to create a work in 2011, Marie’s father had just passed away; two months later, a very close friend died, the cellist Françoise Groben. I decided to rewrite Massspace around an Oriental lamentation in which the clarinet and cello cry and sing together, like the living around the deceased in rural Anatolia. A ritual rhythm inspired by the kudum of the whirling dervishes gradually blends with the dark and disturbing motif of the introduction until the violin, transported to a state of exhilaration, has exhausted itself and dies out. In silence, the performers then recite in canon the sentence I intended for my grandmother and all our dear departed. They take us to a heavenly choral derived from a Sufi melody, both mystical and soothing.