Fire & Forget
ISMN : 979-0-2325-4160-0
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Fire and Forget for piano and live computer, is the “evil twin” of Mémoire de l'eau (“Water Memory”), a piece for accordion and live computer I wrote in 2015 for the wonderful soloist Yohann Juhel.
It was commissioned by the festival Electronic Music Week, organized by the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and premiered by pianist Xiangjun Yu in October 2017 in the Shanghai Symphony's Chamber Hall
Memory has been among my personal obsessions as a composer for several years. In our modern societies, every memories and knowledge are digitized and spread among the network. Truths and lies are made of the same fabric, ones and zeroes. They grow to proportions that we cannot even imagine, such that the only “beings” able to access them all are machines themselves. Memories that are not activated by the mind are cold, dead, memories, they have the same texture as oblivion. This is is the very texture that I tried to explore with this piece.
Fire and Forget is about a pulsion, that is immediately forgotten after satisfaction, a waste. It is about what consumes us, what burns us and turns us to ashes. It is also a ritual of purification, an offering, a rebirth to the light.
The score alternates between strictly written passages (almost integrally generated by computer) and moments of supervised improvisation. A high level of virtuosity is asked from the performed, aiming to represent different states of the matter. The evolution of electronic sounds and live processing on the piano also suggests, to the most infinitesimal level, different types of materials evoking fire, heat, fusion, in its tranquility as in its most extreme frenzy.
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