SAMIR AMAROUCH

Experience.

The concert experience is an experience of time. Contrary to the music you hear every day on TV, radio, and other loudspeakers, concert music has the particularity of making you listen to it. Because the body is prisoner of the space-time of the room where the concert is given, the listening is constrained and the possibility of zapping is no longer allowed. I often hear that this or that work has not been understood. But know that music says nothing that can be understood intelligibly. There is a world, a universe, between the envy, the motivations and the ideals of a composer, and the way in which his work will be heard and understood. As Stockhausen joked, music is always a misunderstanding. It is necessary to pass over this desire of understanding to enter into music. The important thing is that this or that music will make you feel or imagine things and sensations that you would not have imagined or experienced before. Here lies the true meaning of creation. The attitude we must have during a premiere concert is to be open to all potentialities.

Inspiration.

Regarding Area, a short section in my piece Analogies for 16 musicians caught my attention. The glissandi of horn and bassoon that I had imagined in a purely abstract way had a familiar morphology: the howling wolves. Too short in Analogies, this section was developed to the orchestra. To do this, I decided to turn to those who could open me to new ideas: the wolves themselves. So I analyzed many recordings of songs of love of wolves. Far from the roar rooted in the collective imagination, the songs of love are of incredible beauty and complexity. These sounds were so many potentialities to explore in my work as a composer. Here, the musicians are distributed in the space to encircle the quintet, like a pack of wolves communicating within their territory, their range. The horn of the orchestra echoes the horn of the quintet, the strings echoing the horns singing melodies from these songs. ■