violin and piano

For several years, my work has been oriented toward a critical re-reading of the history of music. I have tried to update, through the prism of a contemporary sensibility, certain aesthetic and rhetorical elements, certain interpretative and compositional gestures characteristic of various musical currents that have left their mark on history. There is thus a desire to explore, in the musical domain, what several literary theorists refer to as intertextuality:

to place within relationships — symbolic, cultural, aesthetic or technical — a new text with other previous texts, thus creating a vast referential network which enriches, by multiplying it, the first level of reading.

The work of memory is at the heart of my artistic concerns. I seek to establish a fruitful relationship between the present of the work and the past of art.

A playful relationship with the history of music takes shape on several simultaneous levels. Games of remembering and forgetting, in an interpretation-manipulation of memory. Evocations and reconstructions of the past where the process by which memory makes, unmakes and remakes its own past is exposed through the work, constantly re-evaluating the shifting status of history, constantly projecting it onto its own visions of the future.

This attitude is not a priori a form of nostalgia. It is not a question of returning to a (possible) lost paradise of music. Rather, it is about blurring the boundaries between present, past and future.

As a musician my sensitivity has blossomed under a bombardment of information, stimuli, and diverse and disparate sensations which have strongly influence my musical awareness and way of composing. I practice an integrative, all-encompassing approach, oscillating between modernity and postmodernity. For me, oppositions such as lyricism and objectivism, intuition and rigour, simplicity and complexity, tradition and novelty, far from being mutually exclusive, generate movement and participate in the same gesture: the free and bold exploration of the sound imagination.

[ii-22]

• Score available at CMC, Région du Québec.
• Recording: CD: SNE 639