for saxophones ensemble (12)
Originally written for a twelve-saxophone ensemble, born from a collaboration between the conservatories of Laval, Le Mans, and Angers, L’heurtoir vassal is conceived as an exploration of density and matter. The work eschews traditional chamber music rhetoric, transforming the ensemble into a single, indivisible sonic organism; a sort of giant accordion or human synthesizer seeking the plasticity of electroacoustic soundscapes. Through an architecture strictly grounded in quarter-tone microtonality and unidirectional movements that sweep through the instrumental registers like a single wave, the sound thickens into a palette of extreme dynamic contrasts, creating a physical and almost tangible sonic mass.
At the heart of this rigorous homophony, the texture fractures to evoke the ghosts of tradition through the symbolism of the «threshold.» Distorted and superimposed upon the composer’s own harmony, citations from Wagner’s Einzug der Gäste auf der Wartburg and a Bach chorale—also linked to the imagery of the door—emerge like distant echoes struggling to survive the pressure of the system. The title itself, a nod to Boulez’s Le Marteau sans maître, encapsulates the intellectual unrest behind the piece: the tension between creative freedom and the rigor of a demanding structure. Like a door-knocker awaiting its turn, the work questions whether the creator masters the method, or if it is the very rigor of the system—its vassalage—that ultimately opens the doors to a new dimension of freedom.
In the end, however, these strategies belong strictly to the «compositional kitchen» and do not aim to cross the threshold of the listener’s conscious perception. What truly prevails is an evocative, complex, and intricate texture; an architecture born from immense individual and collective interpretative difficulty which, through that very risk, generates a singular physical and emotional energy.