NON
9′ – 2008
solo music
NON – version percussions
The music of “Non” takes place in two parts: life with the knowledge of fear, its taming, the game with violence and the exchange of polarity. The body hesitates, trembles and then struggles with the outside noises, essentially those of a night of war, explosions, bursts of machine guns, shrapnel. The fight intensifies until the incandescence, place of fire and enjoyment. From this culminating point a slow decrescendo gradually leads the percussionist into another space where everything is blurred. We hear voices, shrouded in unreality, a melody from another world and a few bursts of war in the distance. The piece ends in a silence that emphasizes the confinement of suffering inside the body, the aftermath of a violence that has finally dissipated. In the image of death that keeps the roar of life. Originally this work was written for flamenco dancer Yalda Younes on the occasion of the first anniversary of the death of Lebanese intellectual Samir Kassir.
set
1 percussionist – 1 electroacoustic diffusion system
percussions
metals, 2 toms, 1 bass drum pedal
Premiere October 4, 2008
Abbaye de Royaumont, Paris under the context of the spectacle Déplacé by Claudio Bettinelli, percussions
June 1, 2010 – NON percussion version and electroacoustic device. With Claudio Bettinelli, percussion.
Theater of the Penitents. Montbrison
August 3, 2011 – NON pour percussions – Claudio Bettinelli – Poitiers (La Carrière du Normandou)
December 3, 2011 – NON for percussions by Caludio Bettinelli – Paris (Futurs Composés, Opéra Comique)
April 6, 2013 – NON version for percussions and fixed sounds – Claudio Bettinelli, percussions – Scene Nationale, Albi
January 23, 2013 Presences Festival – Edition dedicated to composers of the Mediterranean
Commissioned by Mezwej
© ŠamaŠ éditions musicales 2008
The links between history and sound have always fascinated Zad Moultaka, a Lebanese composer born in 1967. In NO, he has placed in counterpoint to a flamenco zapateado the bomb sounds he had recorded during his childhood at the time of the civil war. In his latest composition, he connects Martin Luther King’s speech to Hurricane Katrina’s passing on New Orleans on August 28, 2005. “I first read King’s text. Then I listened and I only felt then all its power.
Pablo Galonce, Le Monde de la musique, September 2007
