This work has not yet been premiered.
Rouges – Sont dans le souffle explores the idea that breath contains a presence of infinite richness.
Breath is that which is elusive, barely perceptible, a stream of sound flowing fluidly and gracefully around us.
Rouges – Sont dans le souffle is the complete opposite ; it represents the obvious, that which is in the foreground and which the eye cannot ignore.
From a strictly acoustic point of view, breath is filtered white noise. That is to say, a sound that contains all the pitches within a given frequency range, from which some have been removed to bring out others.
Within this filtered, inharmonic, and unstable white noise lies an infinite number of frequencies. And yet, our ear synthesizes all these sounds to form a single one. Like the sound of wind in a tree’s leaves or the sound of a wave crashing against the sand, white noise is a granular sound, the sum of an infinite number of tiny sounds or elementary sonic units.
In Rouges – Sont dans le souffle, breath is present in its original form: wind sounds from the wind instruments, muted notes from the string instruments, and the rubbing of the bass drum skin. But it is also represented by the morphology of the instrumental motifs, which are fast, sinuous, unpredictable, and highly unstable, like a cool breeze winding through the trees.
Rouges – Sont dans le souffle is an experiment that aims to extrapolate the sound found within breath. To tell all the stories contained within this abyss in order to bring forth the Rouges. The piece can thus be considered a psychoacoustic experiment whose goal is to sensitize the ear to listening to breath and to identifying the red within it. It’s an experience akin to observing nothingness: after observing the void for a few minutes, the body becomes accustomed to the darkness, and extraordinary shapes and colors begin to appear.
It is these colors and shapes, imperceptible at first because they are hidden within the breath, that I have chosen to call Rouges.