Music • Images
TRACKS & DESCRIPtIONs
'Le FRISSON DES DÉBUTS'
Track 1. Camion de pompier (Fire truck):
How I loved the warm red glow of the fire truck I received for my birthday as a young child. I could sit and watch it for hours.
This piece is an attempt to capture the excitement of play, the intensity of childhood imagination, and the sense of security I found in my own imaginary world.
Track 2. Le Héron et Bart ("Wrong Place, Wrong Time...")
Sitting in the back seat of my parents' car, I looked out of the window and saw a heron take off from a ditch beside the road. Then came a dull thud against the windscreen. Feathers drifted through the air as the heron lay motionless on the road. As a child, it felt like my first brush with guilt and mortality.
Syncopated cello figures gradually hint at what is to come. Yet the piece does not end with the expected dramatic final chord. Instead, it almost disappears into the softness of drifting feathers. So funny, I only recently became aware of the harpsichord I used in this piece. Back in '71, I was fascinated by the theme from the tv-series The Persuaders! , composed by John Barry, where the instrument is hard to miss. Its distinctive, almost baroque sound is unmistakable.
Track 3. Des Anguilles sous la glace (Eels Beneath the Ice)
As a young child, I was fascinated by the hidden world beneath frozen water. Beneath the ice, eels and fish seemed suspended between movement and stillness. Some appeared trapped in a silent and inaccessible world, visible yet unreachable. The piece draws on that mixture of fascination and unease: the feeling that something mysterious lies, and dies, just beneath the surface. And I simply could not help it.
At 2:54, a soft and reassuring melody suddenly appears, almost as if hummed under one's breath, the kind of melody a child might sing in the hope that kindness alone could make things right again…
Track 4. Le Poisson Borgne (The One-Eyed Fish)
As a child, I sometimes went fishing. So one day I caught this tiny fish. My hook had pierced its eye, and as I tried to free it, I pulled the eye out!!!
Horrified and deeply upset I threw the fish back into the water. I never went fishing again.
This piece opens like a late-Romantic adagio. Shrill, almost 'Psycho' violin figures announce 'the catch'.
What follows is a mental struggle involving percussion, winds and strings, eventually giving way to a quiet requiem for the poor little fish.
NOTE: Tracks 5, 6 and 7 are orchestral versions of the piano pieces of the same name. More about these works can be found in Musique Peinte.