Le chemin, for piano (1994)
Le chemin (“the path”) is a revised version of the piano part of my Piano Concerto (1993). The title originated after the music was written, as I was trying to collect my ideas about the music. I progressively realized that these ideas about the music, although originally strictly musical, were in deep relation with experiences in my student days, walking for hours in the extraordinary German Black Forest, near Freiburg. As I looked back at this piano part, I became fascinated by the emotional relationships between the music (as well as its construction, its temporal organization, as it were) and these times spent on paths in the forest. This seemed to me very telling of what constitutes a certain form of “programatic” music, where the real associations, abstract at first and outside any sort of narrative content (which don’t exist in this case, anyway), exist in fact in a deep subconscious, before-language world. These observations unveil the imminently “subjective” nature of the music, organized primarily on a motivic basis.
In the Piano Concerto this overt subjectivity is opposed to the radically more objective (“formed”) organization of the orchestral part. The last third of the Concerto, as well as that of Le chemin, exposes an inversion of this process, whereby the music in the piano part is then submitted to severe structural constraints. This leads to an annihiliation of the “expressive” potential of the piano part, a narrowing of the range of its emotional capacities. It is after the journey through this expressive desert that the musical line is able to reconstitute a continuity, to sing again. The ending of the work brings to light a sort of utopian panorama, where subject and object can co-exist peacefully.