To Werner Lambersy

At the start a poet’s commission; and Love at first sight. Need I say more? The beauty of the images in the text, the sensitivity of the poet, the rigor, the control of the words and the tone of the voice, to imagine, to express, to impart the feeling of the approach of death and its reflection on us, the living.

The music? At the service of the poem, in its traditional role of spotlighting the images and the underlying meaning, providing an emotional support. After the initial analysis and a consequent restructuring of the text using silence, the material was fashioned to give it form and meaning, from the standpoint of the imagery of the words.

The form? A kaleidoscope of memory, and through this supple and shifting framework, the fragmentation of time and meaning encountered in the text.

The meaning? Pay attention to the text and let yourself go…

Francis Dhomont writes about Noces noires:

“Dead. The listing of her eyes has lost the horizon. / Coupling with a jolt, the body shunted onto a siding. Making up the new convoy through the intricate railway switches of pain.”

In Noces noires, the text is first and foremost. It tells us of the death of a woman, a mother, the pain, the inevitable solitude. Brief images, fierce, charged with a pent-up emotion. And if it isn’t, at first listening, completely grasped, it’s because the message is rich, the ideas dense.

But it only takes a few snatches, here and there, to entice one to enter the grave and tender universe created by the author’s own voice, his text rendered without emphasis, almost in a whisper. With modesty and good sense, the musician stays behind the scenes. But the finesse of innumerable variations on the sound-symbols keep the ear and the heart spellbound.

February 17, 1988, Eurakousma 18-22 concert, Montréal

Noces noires [Black Wedding] was realized at the Métamorphoses d’Orphée studio of Musiques & Recherches in Ohain (Belgium) in 1986 and was presented on October 2, 1986 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris (France). Narrator: Werner Lambersy. The book Noces noires was published by La table rase (France) and by Éditions du Noroît (Québec) in 1987 and republished in 1993.

Composition

• 1986, Métamorphoses d’Orphée — Musiques & Recherches, Ohain (Belgium)

Premiere

• October 2, 1986, Concert, Centre Pompidou, Paris (France)