To compose this piece, I started from the most elementary gestural idiom, even the “cliché” of the harp, that is to say the glissando. However, thanks to the use of the mute, the glissando loses its original identity (the mute almost completely drowns out the resonance of the instrument).

My intention is to mutate this sound element; either by inducing in the glissé other gestural categories such as the scale or the arpeggio, or by progressively injecting other types of material (such as resonant notes in the extreme low register), or by juxtaposing harp sounds with other sounds of disparate origin (voices, animal cries, storms…) but which still have an objectual kinship with certain harp sounds.

In the course of the work, each element follows its own course, thus drawing in time a tree-like form.

The title of the work is not to be taken as an allusion to a magical ritual or to any search for exoticism, but represents a metaphor for the ability of a material to be transfigured until it loses its original identity. This would amount to a sort of “metempsychosis” of sound.

Some of the sounds were made from the voices of Cathy Achin and Esther Davoust.

© Frédéric Pattar