AUTRE SILENCE
09′ – 2006
for contralto and eight instruments
Autre silence
Autre silence is a vocal piece, sung in Arabic, very oriental in its relation to emptiness and silence. A mother talks about suffering and secrecy … Autre silence seems to end a cycle. The composer visits the remains of a vanished world, where fragments of an earlier life are recognized. This piece, sung in Arabic, is particularly oriental in its relation to void and silence. Like an aspiration. The vacancy of a secret. The inner state is privileged to the detriment of any action. “I know they do not want me to talk about them, because every time I do, they remember the massacre. The dead remember, the memories are as poignant as knives.
set
contralto, 1 flute, 1 clarinet, 1 horn, 1 percussion, 1 violin, 1 cello, 1 viola, 1 double bass
percussions
1 marimba, 1 glockenspiel, 2 gongs : clé de fa (de bas en haut ) : mi (3e interligne) – sol dièse (4e interligne), 2 timbales grave 71 cm et moyenne, 1 vibraphone (+ 2 archets de contrebasse), 4 cloches-tube clé de sol (de bas en haut ) : fa dièse (1e interligne) – la – la dièse (2e interligne) – do dièse (3e interligne) 2 claves, 1 grosse caisse (la plus grave), 1 tom moyen, 1 tom petit
“In silence another silence …”
Premiere: October 9, 2006 Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, Festival Ile de France, Paris, France by Fadia Tomb el-Hage and Ars Nova instrumental ensemble
Text taken from Bâb al-Ghams, by Elias Khoury original publisher Dâr al-Adâd, Beirut, 1998, The door of the sun
November 24, 2007 L’Hexagone, Festival 38e Rugissants, Grenoble, France by Françoise Kubler, soprano and Contemporary Orchestral Ensemble
Commissioned by Ars Nova instrumental ensemble .
© ŠamaŠ éditions musicales 2006
“(…) a” child of war “, for whom creation is” a way to reverse the process of violence by making it no longer undergo but controlable. ” It is precisely the sounds of the war that are the basis of his latest work, Polyphem, named after a medium-range subsonic anti-ship missile specialized in surgical strikes. (…)
In this set of nine pieces, Zad Moultaka explores the sensitive worlds, from panic fear to wild utopia. It goes from the memory of a gone world – Another silence, sung in Arabic by the soprano Françoise Kubler on a text of Bab el Chams, Elias Khoury – in the magnificent No, homage to the Lebanese journalist Samir Kassir, murdered on June 2, 2005, Flamenco dancer Yalda Younes performs a wild zapateado under the sound of a bombardment recorded in Beirut.
Between contemporary Western writing and sensitivity related to Arabic music, Zad Moultaka draws a cosmogony of our time, Azur, room for accordion and tape played by Pascal Contet, An-Nas, chamber music inspired by the last surah of the Koran , “The Men”, performed by the Contemporary Orchestral Ensemble.
Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, November 29, 2007
