|
Joël-François Durand, composer |
Le chemin (1994)
for Piano
Program Notes
Le
chemin ("the path") is a revised version of the piano
part of my Piano Concerto (1993). The title
originated after the music was written. As I was trying to
collect my ideas about the music, I progressively realized
that these ideas, although originally strictly musical, were
in deep relation with experiences in my student days,
walking for hours in the extraordinary German Black Forest,
near Freiburg. As I looked back at this piano part, I became
fascinated by the emotional relationships between the music
(as well as its construction, its temporal organization, as
it were) and these times spent on paths in the forest. This
seemed to me very telling of what constitutes a certain form
of "programatic" music, where the real associations,
abstract at first and outside any sort of narrative content
(which don't exist in this case, anyway), exist in fact in a
deep subconscious, before-language world. These observations
unveil the imminently "subjective" nature of the music,
organized primarily on a motivic basis. In the Piano Concerto this overt subjectivity is opposed
to the radically more objective ("formed") organization of
the orchestral part. The last third of the Concerto, as well
as that of Le chemin, exposes an inversion of this process,
whereby the music in the piano part is now forced into
severe structural constraints, elaborated independently from
its material in the first half, and resulting in fragmented,
and therefore concealed, presentations of a basic melodic
line. This leads to an annihiliation of the "expressive"
potential of the piano part, a narrowing of the range of its
emotional capacities. It is after the journey through this
expressive desert that the musical line is able to
reconstitute a continuity, to sing again. The ending of the
work brings to light a sort of utopian panorama, where
subject and object can co-exist peacefully. Le chemin is dedicated to Stefan Litwin.
