Duration: 6 min.

for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, viola and cello

Among the writing means acquired by the music, many procedures have been inspired by electroacoustic techniques. Rather than imitating, the composer may derive formal models and thereby turn a technical process into a form of perception of time. This is the case of fading, which organizes the exchanges of energy from one sound to another, and whose morphing is the meticulous form.

Composed for the Milan Expo after the theme « feeding music », Fading was born from those transformations that philosophers and chemists mention since Anaxagoras: « for nothing comes into being or perishes, but is rather compounded or dissolved from things that are ». Throughout the piece, five primordial textures, each one guided by the articulation of one or two instruments, combine with all others to achieve a variety of metamorphoses, a phylogenesis of sounds which is discovered like a botanical garden.

Inside this small cosmos, there is yet neither stillness nor profusion. As the sound extends and tries to remain, its energy slowly escapes. Since the descending line that opens the piece until the final silence that dissolves it, each attempt of revival lets inexorably the sound burn, first distorted, whispered and finally swept aside; the whole fading becomes a disappearance.

Premiere

September 27th, 2015, by the Sentieri Selvaggi ensemble, Milan Expo, Italian Pavilion.