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- Kaija Saariaho
Grammaire des rêves (1988)
(Grammaire des reves)- Edition Wilhelm Hansen Helsinki (World)
Dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Barrière
- 2fl/hp/va.vc
- soprano, alto
- 11 min
- Paul Éluard, text collage
Programme Note
Grammaire des Rêves (Grammar of Dreams, 1988-89) was born from my curiosity about the relationship between human voice and instruments, a subject which I had put aside for many years. As the title of the piece indicates, another source of interest was the structural life of dreams.
Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form.
Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as imaginary matrices, through which the instrumental parts are ‘filtered’.
The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard. Some longer fragments have been used from his poem ‘Premierèment’ (‘L’Amour la Poésie’).
Different ideas concerning the research of dreams (for example, how our moving body affects our dreams, changing their directions or interrupting them; in this piece the harp is imagined as a collection of restless limbs, which by their movements direct the musical flow), are drawn to the background during the compositional work, or are transformed into purely musical form.
Another interest was to search for a fusion in this rather heterogeneous ensemble. For this reason the musical texture is maybe more simple than in some other of my recent pieces, and the more radical textural changes have been replaced by vibratos, trills, glissandi, dynamic evolutions and other gestures, used here as imaginary matrices, through which the instrumental parts are ‘filtered’.
The major part of the text is a collage from the texts of Paul Eluard. Some longer fragments have been used from his poem ‘Premierèment’ (‘L’Amour la Poésie’).
Media
Grammaire des Rêves
Halcyon
Features
- Kaija Saariaho’s Poetic Montages
- From the very beginning of her career as a composer, Kaija Saariaho has turned to poetry as a material and inspiration for her music. The forms and logics of poetry have played a defining role in her output since then.
