Premiered on France Musique in September 2022, Franck Bedrossian's Départs de feu cycle was born of the encounter with the mezzo-soprano voice of Laura Muller. An opus for solo voice in which poetry and audacity play a central role.

Poems. Short, punchy, edgy, vibrant. Five miniatures, five haiku-like poems by Céline Minard, inspired Franck Bedrossian's new cycle, Départs de feu, the composer's first opus for solo voice.

One pen, one voice

I'm reading more and more poetry," confides Franck Bedrossian. Caught up in the flow of information, I like the short form, the suspended moment offered by poetry. An avid reader of Emilie Dickinson and Rimbaud, this is Bedrossian's first collaboration with a contemporary poet. He met Céline Minard at the Villa Medici in Rome in 2007. " I had given her a sketch of a saxophone quartet I was working on. I remember that she liked the graphic design of the score. Then I discovered his novels. A meeting with a pen and, a few years later, a meeting with a voice. One day in September 2019, under the Cistercian vaults of Royaumont Abbey, Franck Bedrossian was struck by the timbre of mezzo-soprano Laura Muller. The need to write for solo voice was already there. " I believe that a composer who is not capable of writing a piece for solo voice is not complete. That's where it all starts. The whole symphonic instrumentarium is, it seems to me, an extrapolation of the vocal source." But what is it about the singularity of a voice that moves us? A mystery ..." Whether in Baroque, classical or contemporary music, I've rarely been touched by voices. I've been more moved by the twilight dimension of Byzantine chants, and by certain rock voices too".

Vocal laboratory

2020, confinement. " After writing my piano concerto, in the midst of a pandemic, I called Laura Muller back. In this time of crisis, I probably wanted to return to the source of music in a radical way". And the idea caught on... In the spring of 2021, the two artists began working together. From the outside, their experimental sessions looked like improvisation. "Except that I gave the performer so many constraints that she didn't have much choice! I asked her to produce a wide range of sounds and effects - cries, rasps, various vocalizations, tremolos, vibrations, whispers, sound textures on very fast consonants, stutters... - at sometimes extreme tempi". With quasi-scientific precision, Bedrossian records, samples, classifies and listens to all these sound actions, over and over again, as raw material to weave his future piece. "For example, to find the right stutter, I'd ask him to repeat a sentence as quickly as possible, stumbling over all the consonants. And one day I said: 'That's it, I've found the sound!

Then comes the text, five previously unpublished poems by Céline Minard: "Précipitation", "Circulation", "Départs de feu", "Roulement" and a "Final" that concludes with the words "Et nous qui s'enfuit". The theme? Ecology and eco-anxiety about dwindling resources and the future of the planet. This could have been inhibiting ... "... What saved me was the ambiguity of the text, its poetic dimension," explains Franck Bedrossian. There's something incantatory about Céline's poetry, bordering on song and nursery rhyme. Certain phrases lend themselves to different interpretations, just as in a song. This was the composer's first musical setting of a text written to order and in French.

The art of metamorphosis

French, in fact. I was extremely careful to ensure that the text could be understood," he insists. I incorporated a lot of language. When, on the other hand, I wanted melodic freedom and no need for the text to be understood, I stretched and compressed the durations. In the third movement, the melody takes shape and soars with non-textual syllables, which are added and stretched so much in duration that you don't realize they're words." The five movements of Départs de feu explore the possibilities of the spoken voice, varying all its parameters: pitch (from very low to high), timbre (whispered, murmured, spoken) and intensity: right up to the scream. A whole range of vocal techniques feed the sound texture: tongue rolls, mixed consonants and even kisses... Composer and performer deliver, in short, a music where melody is contained in speech.

Acoustic illusions

"What interested me was to have music that continues to be polyphonic, even with a solo voice. For the composer loves what transforms. Franck Bedrossian creates acoustic illusions: "I had this fantasy of recreating what we have in Bach's violin repertoire, in the Chaconne... A single voice that becomes multiple. We need polyphony, even in a solo piece. I wanted to give the illusion of different sound levels. Thanks to the speed of elocution, contrasts and very rapid dynamics, we get the striking impression of a voice that splits into two.

Five shades of solitude

Sometimes, the meaning - or one of the possible meanings - of a piece becomes apparent to the composer after the fact. Listening to the piece once, twice, I realized that it was a staging of solitude, in different contexts," confides Bedrossian. To feel less alone, the voice, the performer, is obliged to split into two parts, and this requires great virtuosity ". The composer's desire to thwart the limits of perception has resulted in a complex, acrobatic score. " For me, virtuosity is an enviable consequence of writing, not an end in itself. On the other hand, virtuosity that constantly plays with limits can only interest me". In the last movement, for example, Laura Muller sings and whistles at the same time.

In these short poems, the voice alone, often panting, expresses the urgency to speak. Départs de feu deploys a music of urgency and speed. The proof is in the final stammer: "In the end, this voice is released by the words," explains Franck Bedrossian. The stammer supplants the speech. But this headlong rush, this stammer, is transformed from a handicap into a melody, like an embellishment. Franck Bedrossian quotes Rimbaud, echoing the "Final" of his Départs de feu : " Ce ne peut être que la fin du monde, en avancer.

From the airwaves to the stage

Départs de feu was commissioned for the program Création mondiale, directed by Anne Montaron on France Musique, and broadcast in its entirety on Sunday September 25. From now on, the composer has in mind the stage premiere on April 21, 2023, scheduled as part of the ^32nd Biennale of Contemporary Music in Zagreb (Croatia), co-sponsor of the piece with France Musique. An experience that Franck Bedrossian is looking forward to. "I can't wait to see these five stages of solitude embodied and projected on stage. Slight amplification, with loudspeakers, is planned.
The composer concludes: "This is really the piece I wanted to write.

Suzanne Gervais