Mutations saturées sur le devant de la nuit II

Mutations saturées sur le devant de la nuit II
for flute, saxophone, percussion, piano, violin, viola and cello
(2008 ; rev. 2012)
ca.14'


Instrumental forces 
Flute in C also Piccolo Flute ; Soprano Saxophone also Tenor Saxophone
Percussion (1 Spring Drum, 
1 Chime Tree
, 1 reversed Snare Drum with a medium Cymbal over the springs, 1 Tam – Tam (medium or large)
, 1 Vibraphone
, 2 China Gongs, 
1 Suspended Gong
, 1 Crotal ( c ), 
1 Cow bell
, 1 Conga, 
1 archet
, Soft mallets) ; Piano ; Violin; Viola; Cello

Program Note
Mutations
Some fragments from my first septet, Ixcoyohualli (2004), and my string quartet, 'Iweiyari (2007), are embedded and subjected to transformations by temporal stretching and contractions as well as overlays. This is the structural material for the polyphonic passages of the work. Pitches are derived from a constraint — a series of pitches proposed by Gérard Pesson for the first volet of this series : Mutations Saturées sur le Devant de la Nuit (I). This constraint is on it self derived from an infinite series — Per Nørgård's deductive procedure for pitch. This material was subjected to processes of proliferation, multiplication and détrournement, using the computer. Then by ear, a reduction of these materials was made in order to establish the three harmonic fields of the work. Then by ear again, during the final phase of composition, by means of a procedure I like to call cognitive filtering, the process of trasformation was pushed towards the field of resonance.
Saturation
Take a city like Mexico City ; take a remote place in the middle of the jungle in the Yucatan Peninsula. Consider these environments as sound phenomena in their own right. Feed imagination with this, so the possibility of being sensible to movement and noise, as well as to the confrontation of order and disorder can emerge. If you are a composer, this may be part of your concerns : how to put in composition that chaos in motion? Xenakis proposed the alternative of stochastic music. Estrada based some of his most important works on the belief of a continuum between the real and the imaginary. For my part, considering the contribution of these references, I work on the kinetic energy contained in instrumental gestures, to speculate about the relation between sound, saturation, imagination and gesture.
In front of the Night
This work maintains a genetic link with Ixcoyohualli (“In-front of the night“ in Nahuatl) particularly in terms of poetic research. The "in- front of the night" : the moment of acceptance of death, or that of REM sleep, just before the start of the oeniric voyage, or even the path of the sun to its setting, this paradoxical moment of day that calls for calm and meditation, but that is lived in the kingdom of birds as a moment of wild jubilation.