I am regularly asked about the process of creating a musical work: “Is there a recipe? Are you following a plan? How do you start from nothing and manage to complete a 55-minute work, like this requiem that you have just written? » I sometimes respond with a joke: “I get up early!” »
In fact, the subject is intriguing. Even performing musicians ask me the question most seriously. So I respond a little evasively, as Simenon did: “I’m just mopping up. » By this I mean that, like some people, I spend hours humming tunes that come from who knows where, without thinking much about it, while walking, strolling or otherwise. I collect these tunes and, if I like them, I end up writing them down, and they end up collected without order in a sort of scrapbook.
Some of these themes come back to haunt me on moonless evenings or sleepless nights, and, I’m only kidding, the only way to get rid of them is to expand them into something a little more substantial. Then, like the squirrel on the threshold of winter, I bury them and forget them. And the day arrives when, against all odds, one of these embryonic themes beckons me and comes to life.
This theme arises as a precursor to a story to tell, and at this stage, I begin to visualize what the entire piece will become. Because, this is perhaps one of my singularities, I see the music.
Literally ! A theme is black and white or in color, it is bright or dark, it will make you dance or think, it will be movement or static. All that remains is to make it move forward, give it a rhythm, charge it with harmony, graft secondary tributaries, invent ramifications for it.
But nothing has been said yet. It remains to define and specify the form of this story. It needs a beginning, a development, a plot, twists and turns, a logical ending. It must captivate the listener, seduce them, reveal secrets to them, move them. If there is a text to incorporate, it is necessary to take into account its poetic character, its emotional charge, the images it evokes, the tonic accents, the direction of its progression.
This was precisely the case with this requiem mass I wrote recently. By revisiting the centuries-old and immutable Latin texts which constitute its framework, by translating and adapting them to our time, I discovered new landscapes, colors and tones. I heard beings expressing universal emotions at the moment of their last breath.
From then on, my common thread was found, I just had to let the skein unfold: twelve specific songs evoking the range of human feelings, fear, worry, exaltation, nostalgia, hope , bliss, liberation. My “story” held together, it had found its form: a beginning, a middle, an end.
This example clearly demonstrates what can inspire the composer. But his work is far from finished. His music still only exists on paper. Like the playwright, we must add companionship. Who will perform it? An instrumental soloist? A singer ? A choir ? It will be necessary to take into account the natural range of the performer, that is to say his limit of register in the bass and treble.
If circumstances require it – an interpretation with an orchestra for example – a final step is necessary, that of orchestration, a work which is similar to the choice of colors in a painting: entrusting a particular counter-song to a particular instrument; impose the main plot on a soloist – for example the piano in a concerto; entrust the general accompaniment to the mass of stringed instruments.
We understand that this step opens the way to thousands of choices and permutations. A warning is necessary and it applies to any artistic creation: a concerto, an opera, a symphony, a requiem, any musical, theatrical, visual or pictorial work must obey a law, balance. Because all this work will have been for nothing if the overall form of the work is lame.
I had already told a professor of musical analysis: “Music begins when you stop analyzing it!” » But in the end, no matter how much we talk, talk, explain, get lost in conjectures, the creation of a work of art remains a mystery.
Who is François Dompierre?
François Dompierre is an important composer from Quebec. He was able to seduce with 200 songs (This evening I have tenderness in my soul), advertising music (There are six million of us…), A musical (Tomorrow morning, Montreal is waiting for me), several concert scores and 60 film scores (The decline of the American empire). A radio host, he has also published two biographies, including his own. His new concert work, a requiem, will be conducted by conductor Francis Choinière at the Maison symphonique and the Palais Montcalm in June.