At the confluence of the currents of Ohana’s imagination and poetics, these perfect miniatures compose a kind of self-portrait in hollow, with a double dimension, retrospective and prospective, since one finds there at the same time the memory of the “free counterpoints” of the second book of studies in “Nuées” (n°3), of the chimes which mark out his work (n°4), and the announcement of the lullaby sung by Mélibée on the body of dead Calyx, in the tenth picture of “La Célestine”, like the prefiguration of the Afro-Cuban incantations of his last great work, “Avoaha”.

This music is apparently simple in its clarity and economy, but “dangerously simple” in the pitfalls of its luminous nakedness. There is in these four Haï-Kaï a Satie-like stripping down, of which Ohana said that one of the most prophetic revelations was “to have glimpsed, almost alone with Debussy, the importance of the melody in a future entirely walled up behind harmonic, orchestral and rhythmic research…”.

Édith Canat de Chizy and François Porcile, “Maurice Ohana”, Fayard editions

Movements

I] Berceuse

II] Mayombé

III] Clouds

IV] Carillons