MEMENTO is a musical cycle that summons natural materials (leaves, stones, wood, sand, water, grass) and materials (metals, glass, wool, coal) and questions their power to become music or otherwise a meaningful sound. The music, at the beginning exclusively acoustic and instrumental, is little by little won by sounds which emanate from natural materials that an instrumentalist-performer manipulates on the stage and amplified by a particular microphony. These sounds, half concrete, half electronic, first appear as interludes and then gradually permeate the music itself.
The cycle involves 7 musicians, 1 percussionist-performer of electronic music and 1 conductor for the last two pieces of the cycle. MEMENTO is a set of 6 pieces, each one calling for a different instrumental formation.
The cycle refers to the plastic universes of Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, Claudio Parmiggiani, Richard Long, to this art that tries to measure a "gap": the one that separates nature and the artistic gesture, the material and its manufacture or transformation, the one that separates natural phenomena (fire, erosion) and human action (sculpting, digging, breaking, disposing), the one that separates nature from the places where art takes place. In a way, what unites the practices of these artists (and of many others) would be the attempt, necessarily a little vain, to measure with the yardstick of a geological time the meager time of the man.
The works referred to in the cycle are often in between: halfway between sculpture and installation, performance and painting, scenography and hanging.
Coproduction
Ensemble Cairn ; Festival Musica ; GMEM - Centre national de création musicale
The Cairn Ensemble
"The Ensemble Cairn was founded in 1998. Attentive to both a rigorous work of ensemble and chamber music, the repertoires approached by the Ensemble Cairn are sensitive to the opening towards other aesthetic forms and other artistic practices: jazz, circus, plastic arts, dance, literature, video, etc. The concerts are conceived as inner journeys in which each spectator is invited to imagine a sensitive relationship with sound. Cairn's artistic collaborations include composers and artists from a wide variety of backgrounds such as Gérard Pesson, Philippe Leroux, Tristan Murail, Noriko Baba, Thierry Blondeau, and jazzmen Marc Ducret, John Hollenbeck, and Jozef Dumoulin, harpsichordist Violaine Cochard, singers Cristina Branco, Juliette Allen, Léa Trommenschlager, video artists Pierre Nouvel and Boris Labée, choreographers Alban Richard and Hervé Robbe, circus artist Sylvain Julien, painter Raphaël Thierry... Cairn regularly performs on the French national stages and internationally. It has also been invited to numerous festivals: Présences de Radio France, ManiFeste (Ircam), Festival d'Automne à Paris, abbaye de Royaumont, Musica (Strasbourg), Ferienkurse (Darmstadt), Tage für Neue Musik (Zurich), Villa Medici (Rome), Borealis (Norway), Archipel (Geneva), Festival Spring, Prague Quadrennial. The Ensemble Cairn now has eleven musicians, Jérôme Combier is the artistic director and Guillaume Bourgogne the musical director. Since 2012, the Ensemble Cairn is associated with the Théâtre d'Orléans, Scène nationale, and attached to the Centre-Val de Loire region. In 2022, he was the interpreter of the opera of Philippe Leroux, production of Angers-Nantes opera, " L'Annonce faite à Marie " on the eponymous text of Paul Claudel.
Corentin Marillier
percussion
Cédric Jullion
flute (also piccolo, alto flute and bass flute)
Maroussia Gentet
piano
Ayumi Mori
clarinet (also bass clarinet)
André Feydy
trumpet
Fanny Vicens
accordion
Constance Ronzatti
violin
Guillaume Bourgogne
direction