French composer Thierry Pécou is in Quebec this week with his ensemble Variances. Associated with Paramirabo, he will direct the creation of one of his works on Tuesday at Bourgie Hall, a concert resumed in Chicoutimi on Thursday.
For nearly 30 years, Thierry Pécou has been one of the most interesting voices in contemporary music. Even though he was born in the Parisian suburbs 58 years ago, his West Indian ancestry gave him a curiosity for sounds from elsewhere, which he knew how to mix with his creations in fertile soil, showing the infinite richness of this path that others pride themselves on refusing to explore, such as Sandeep Bhagwati, star composer of the Société de musique contemporain du Québec this season.
It was through CDs remarkably produced and published by Harmonia Mundi that we discovered the music of Thierry Pécou. To land Tremendum, is traveling to Brazil; observe The flower treeit is both letting oneself be hypnotized by orientalizing sounds and yielding to a rhythmic complexity heir to the Ligeti revolution in Musica Ricercata.
In the Wikipedia entry devoted to Pécou, we find an allusion to the alliance of Japanese Gagaku and Gregorian. We counted on the composer to refresh our memory. “It’s a piece from the very beginning, I was still a student. It’s difficult to find,” Thierry Pécou tells us, who himself searches for a few moments before remembering the title: The Eastern Star !
Gamelan
Mr. Pécou embraces the confluence between tradition and creation more than ever: “It is still my universe, very steeped in exchanges with other cultures. I know that in Canada and North America the question of cultural appropriation is raised. This is a subject on which I question myself, even if, in my work, I have always considered that I was not in a process of appropriation, but of “entering into dialogue with”, which changes a lot about the philosophy and the way of working with other cultures. »
This way is in depth: “In recent years, my creations were often infused with work done with the Navajos, notably a poet, Laura Tohe. This gave rise to an opera, Nahasdzáán, performed in 2019 in Rouen and Caen. More recently, I worked on Balinese gamelan, notably studying the work of ethnomusicologists, which allowed me to enter into this subject from a theoretical point of view. My last two important pieces, Cara Bali Concertowritten for Alexandre Tharaud, and Tuesday’s piece, Byar, are directly inspired by the gamelan. » Indian music gave rise, for Variances, to a piece entitled Sangata for three Western instruments and three Indian instruments.
In Montreal, Tuesday, and in Chicoutimi, Thursday, Variances by Thierry Pécou meets Paramirabo by Jeffrey Stonehouse, two ensembles of 17 “type Lunar Pierrot », as the composer characterizes them. “We thought we would play the Double Sextet, by Steve Reich,” says Pécou, but Paramirabo had recently approached him. “So we found Pulse, by Reich, more recent piece with double desks. » The sets merge there, unlike Double Sextetwhere they oppose each other. Byarfrom Pécou, will use the same formation, with an additional percussion.
Thierry Pécou composed in 2006 The innumerable bird, an admirable 20-minute piano concerto. How to pass such a partition to the directory? “It turns out that at this moment, The innumerable bird is in Berlin in a choreographic show, performed live by the orchestra in the pit for around ten performances,” the composer tells us. “But, overall, the observation is correct. What is lacking for recognition and entry into the repertoire is great performers who take it up. » It would therefore be necessary that after Alexandre Tharaud, “one or two more interpreters” take up this Bird in flight.
This inertia of works after their creation does not discourage Thierry Pécou from composing for orchestra. “That doesn’t make me give up writing for the symphony. It’s true that it’s difficult, while orchestras are becoming a little cautious, even in Europe, about getting involved in creation. But I continue to meet them, to generate creations; We have to fight. »