string ensemble, percussion and piano

Commission: SMCQ

Premiere: May 1, 2022, Brasier — Portrait de Linda Bouchard, Salle Pierre-Mercure — Centre Pierre-Péladeau, Montréal (Québec)

To Walter Boudreau

We live on a beautiful blue rock that is our planet. Among its inhabitants, some like to believe that we are all interconnected. When we experienced the shock of the pandemic, when everything almost immediately stopped, I felt a “fracture” as if we were experiencing a dissolution in the continuity of our human movement, a deep physical break in this interconnection.

I began to explore this fracture as if it were a vertical instant, a sudden force of great transformation, an implosion, a change irreconcilable with the past.

In Fracture, something breaks, but before it breaks, it wants to make itself heard, it grinds, it scrapes, it turns on itself, it carries the past in layers of textures, in disordered colors that seek to reveal themselves before disappearing. Fracture is first articulated like an earthquake. Gestures jostle and overlap, there is no resolution. The second part consists of tremolo, of a cloud of pizzicato, as if we are catching our breath on the edge of a crater that makes us dizzy. Then, suddenly, the violence of the memory comes back in a very dense moment.

The last section is a sort of coda. The noise carries with it all the colors and textures and when finally disappears, there is no silence because life, breath and hope still remains. A scale of equal tones slowly unfolds; in fact, this scale was always present.

This work was commissioned by the SMCQ and is dedicated to Walter Boudreau who has always believed in my creative work. I am deeply grateful to him.