SAMIR AMAROUCH

« To understand what is involved in the writing of Lighting, it should first be noted that the organ is not a priori a preferred instrument in the landscape of contemporary music, for several reasons. First, the sound that it produces follows a "binary" logic, what means that it exists or does not exist. The infinite possibilities of attacks, holding, sliding and extinguishing the sound of wind instruments or string instruments are impossible to transpose to the organ. Then, its intrinsic inability to hear something other than a harmonic sound – with a fixed pitch – irremediably removes the instrument of contemporary creation, whose language largely assimilates inharmony and noise since the 1970s.

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In practice, Lighting takes the organ as a reservoir of timbres, which writing hastens to merge with the timbres of the instruments on stage. If this fusion is possible, it is above all because the original idea of ​​the work is melodic: the voices sing a mono-syllabic text – written by the composer – that the instruments treat in resonance, in the manner of a synthetic vocoder. The ear hears this melody, but as a texture, because the temporality associated with it is very dilated. This slow melody thus sometimes gives way to "surface" elements, whose perception is more immediate: they are fast, idiomatic ornaments of the piccolo or flute, sometimes reminiscent of certain Messiaen's Birds, and taken up by all instruments. Slow vocal melody and ornaments alternate, thus forming a structure inherited from spectral aesthetics. The organ, in an unexpected way, also lends itself to this play on temporality: towards the end of the piece, an acoustic extinction phenomenon spatialises the whole church and is transmitted to the other instruments, before bringing a final cadence of organ, resuming and glorifying all the preceding ornaments. »

Edouard Bozet