L’art de toucher le clavecin, 3 [2011]

three sequences for piccolo with violin and percussion

duration :: 11’

First performance :: ensemble mosaik, Acht Brücken Festival (Köln), 2 May 2012

L’art de toucher le clavecin is the title of a famous instructional pamphlet by François Couperin, the master claveciniste of the French Baroque, which gives a concise but invaluable guide to interpretation, performance, and ornamentation of the singular keyboard music of that time and place.

The present series of works (a forthcoming piccolo solo, L’art de toucher le clavecin, 2 for piccolo with violin [2009], and this trio) forms, I suppose, some sort of oblique homage to Couperin’s aesthetic of ornamented surface, of a simple ground-gesture that is forced to proliferate if it wants to inhabit a space.  Most obviously, there is “melodic” ornamentation everywhere, not only where one expects to see it—in the form of trills, mordents, and other related figures adorning fundamentally simple gestures of pitch, bow, and breath—but also in the structure of the piece, which takes the form of a fitful and gap-filled flowering of a small stable of “stock figures.” 

L’art de toucher le clavecin, 3 is based on the previously composed duo for piccolo with violin.  The insinuating presence of the percussion is an excuse to disarm the forces that shape the duo into a singular whole.  Instead, here is a collection of fragments, sorted into three separately programmed “sequences” and, within each sequence, separated by pauses or frozen events that disperse accumulated energies and enforce an uneasy calm.  The spikes and eddies of the duo are smoothed out, replaced by a uniformly stifled dynamic level and a reduced sound palette, wiped over by sandblocks or gently articulated by muffled crotales and small wooden percussion, the regular pulses that were buried by figuration in the duet brought gently if vaguely to the fore.