Saisons

The universe of haiku had already been addressed by the composer in 2009 with the 11 short poems for chorus gathered under the title “Sur la Montagne sans nom”. Here over the seasons, the Japanese language disappears under an imaginary language, a bouquet of strange phonemes and ŠamaŠtopoeia. There remains the delicate poetic perfume, the sharp arrow, the clean lines and the heaps of fragmented images that the Impressionist verses generate: A shower of petals / I would like to drink / the water of distant mists! (Issa) or On the surface of the water / silk furrows / spring rain (Ryokan) …

The haikus, chosen freely from the huge Japanese literary corpus (Basho, Issa, Ryokan, Akimoto Fujio, Natsum Soseki, Yasuhara Teishitsu …), draw a complex path deliberately borrowed from musical writing.

The lyricism of the piece emanates from the instruments while the voice retreats into abstraction, the non-verbal, informs, inarticulate, even insignificance. Roland Barthes, in The Empire of Signs, spoke of the “panic suspension of language” …

Spring
Prepare for death
get ready
rustle cherry blossoms
Issa
Summer
the moon at midnight
as
a block of freshness!
Yasuhara Teishitsu
Fall
This sunset of autumn
it looks like
the land of shadows
basho
Winter
Farewell
beyond the fog
a deeper fog
Mitsuhashi takajo