baritone and fixed medium

Premiere: February 22, 2013, Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques 2013: Rosarium, Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur, Montréal (Québec)

Désert (2012) is the extension of the internal questioning that the baritone/protagonist underwent in Rosarium. The singer is alone in this space vividly evoked in the title, scorching by day, frigid by night, under the millions of stars that shine on the millions of grains of sand that surround him. Here, far from the Psaumes of David used in Rosarium, I had to compose the text myself, to attempt a kind of meditation yet more personal, entirely free of references. As for the musical content, I decided to mutate the instrumental tone of the live Rosarium trio into a radically different texture, that is to say a continuum held on a support that brings together natural sound takes with recorded music containing synthetic tones. So it is here in an environment suddenly more abstract that a measure of the baritone is taken, a sonic world broadcast by loudspeaker. Desert: symbolic place, with its extreme and difficult conditions, the image of which man is creating little by little on earth…

[English translation: Oliver Haeffeley, iii-13]