On July 1st, 2021, for the Chamber Music Summer Meetings in Strasbourg, the Accroche Note ensemble played two Éphémères, composed one year before, during the experience of the quasi-planetary lockdown.
les éphémères V : éclats (2020)
for flute, clarinet, soprano, harp, 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass
les éphémères VI : nuées (2020)
for flute, bass clarinet, soprano, violin, viola, double bass
Ensemble Accroche Note
- Françoise Kubler, soprano
- Armand Angster, clarinets
- Samuel Casale, flute
- Jérémy Lirola, double bass
- Jean-Baptise Haye, harp
Quatuor Adastra
- Julien Moquet, Anne Lombard, violins
- Marion Abeilhou, viola
- Antoine Martynciow, cello
Les éphémères are a series of short pieces which explore the kind of attentive and fleeting listening, that occurs during the contemplation of ephemeral phenomena. Where there is no drama, the ear anticipates no tension, it watches the instabilities of instrumental sound, at the limit of music.
Éclats repeats the same elementary gesture of apparition and vanishing. Its deformations build a soundscape, depending on whether the sounds merge or split. The emerging voice bursts feature fragments of Otto Frisch and his aunt Lise Meitner’s account of their discovery of atomic nucleus fission between 1932 and 1938.
The abstract world of atom gives way then to Nuées, with a more concrete nature : bird flights. The sounds of flapping wings, lapping, a breath or a roar, hardly above silence, deal with the shapes of wind and the bird flocks, in both details and overall movements.
Dedicated to Accroche Note
Commissioned by Festival d’Autan