saxophone and orchestra

Commission: Orchestre national de Lorraine, Orchestre de Radio-France, Arsenal (Metz, France)

To Claude Delangle

L’unique trait de pinceau (A Single Brushstroke) is a piece composed along the lines of a great ascending movement broken with long silences representing those breaches. They reveal the blank part of the sound page with the idea that the true music may be the one which unfolds mysteriously in our inner listening within these silences: silences of memory and the summary of what we have just heard. In the spirit of the Single Brushstroke by Chinese painter Shitao, I have tried to present a single musical motion, a perpetual ascension, but in a non-linear way, in elastic time. The piece also explores the relationships between the soloist, small instrumental groups and the orchestra, each one a metaphor for the relationships that exist between an individual, the immediate environment and the crowd.