Dedicated to Claude Barraud

Created on January 31, 2022 at the Salle Poirel in Nancy by Ancuza Aprodu, piano and the Stanislas quartet

Duration: ca. 25' - Editions Delatour France

      Following the death of a longtime friend – sculptor and ceramist – her ashes are spread in the heart of the wetland of the Gironde estuary in a lush place where nature is particularly alive / lively and enveloping. She shared her life with Claude Barraud, painter, who guided us in this "secret" place, chosen as their place.

      Violence of the epitaph: "in the end, we are little" - violence of the scattered ashes.

      From this deeply moving experience, Cendres was born, an extremely contrasting work. I have made this journey within nature my own, the writings of Philippe Jaccottet and Philippe Soupault open by my side, poets who have experienced such pain. Three states cross the work:

• exuberance, proliferation, contrasts, abundance/envelopment of  nature

• appeasement, consolation, erasure, disappearance, trace, silence

• eternal return, gradual cessation and suspension of time

      For a long time, I wanted to compose a quintet for piano and strings, formation for which Schumann, broken and double man, wrote so well. If it were necessary to pay tribute to this intimate composer beyond time, Cendres , a sort of lamentation or animist ritual for a deceased friend, would be it.

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(…)

Signs which are helpful, and which are becoming rarer.

And finally, in desperation, almost three years to the day after that morning in Truinas, this resolution to be satisfied – but to be satisfied is saying too much – with the work done.

Because what I tried there to retain becomes something more and more distant.

Something that will end up resembling a foreign language that you would have long thought you understood and even dared to speak, and which would gradually become unintelligible to you.

Or to a long-effective remedy that would no longer work, and for which no substitute could be found.

Or it would be like a hand withdrawing, a face turning away.

The sun of life which recedes a step, then many steps.

I wonder if a bird can still pass in that sky.

Philippe Jaccottet

Truinas

April 21, 2001

(La Dogana Editions)

NOTHING

Nothing, not even ashes

not even the memory nothing more

Nothing more except this joy of oblivion

this wind of oblivion that tears everything away

destroy everything and trash the rest

The time has finally come to stop hoping

no longer waiting no longer believing

not to imagine not to tremble anymore

to know that we no longer fear the void

that all is consumed consumed disembodied

than what was no longer anything

even nothing not even nothingness

I no longer sneer, I no longer smile

I no longer look down or look up

I don't even rub them anymore I don't sleep

I watch like a stone without its shadow

and I'm transparent like time

I live as clouds and smoke live

I erase myself and until the last traces

Philippe Soupault

Poems found 1918-1981

(Lachenal & Ritter edition)