Eugène Birman
Manifesto (2014/2017) #10’
— création mondialepour orchestre
D.R.
A faraway folk-song of unknown provenance; the memory of things that might not have ever been; the music one hears in the gaze of one’s reflection: I have explored paradoxes in my music before but never has a piece been so obsessive, so obsessively devoted to finding the sound of the surreal, quantum world of the senses. From the external silence into a deepening inner cacophony where each motion, each blinking of an eye is an event of music, I tore out what sounded to me like a folk song. Its every gesture, motion, shape, its unfamiliarity, its faltering presence in my memory, formed the totality of this piece. There is nothing more here but that. To focus so singularly has been a
dream of mine, to avoid all musical contact in the form of “inspiration,! and instead to construct a world so impenetrable that what arises, arises ex nihilo. Here is a piece of non-linear time (in fact, it can be said without reservation that it is ten seconds of music, measured as ten minutes), of a tune that loses its structure and context before it is ever really sung. And then there is a moment when time really does stop, but instead of a most deafening silence, I try to create quiet and solitude in sound instead.
I have tried to write the sound of those things, to leave the cracks wide open – to listen and find the music wholly within.