Poème d’appartenance (2008)

chamber ensemble

As I began to compose this work, I thought of Terre Québec, an anthology of poems by Quebec writer Paul Chamberland that I had read a few months earlier. My music seemed to be aligning itself with the verses that had made the strongest impression on me, and I decided to associate each section of my work with a specific passage or passages.

The longest excerpt is from Poème d’appartenance, the poem that gave my composition its name. In the anthology, the poem appears in italics at the very beginning of the book, like a kind of epigraph. Silence is an important theme in this poem, and thus I associated it with the opening and closing sections of my work, wich are rather spare and introspective. The two central sections, on the other hand, are linked to excerpts from two intensely lyrical and evocative poems; in musical form, they evoke the vastness and power of the Quebec landscape.

Generally speaking, notions of belonging to the land, the land as woman (la femme pays), imply a certain narcissistic exploration of identity; but Chamberland takes a different view. For him, “individuality is not a matter of displaying the multiple aspects of a massive ego, but rather of acknowledging one’s responsibility to others” (transl.). (Quoted by Danielle Laurin on the Prix du Québec website (www.prixduquebec.gouv.qc.ca/recherche/desclaureat.asp?noLaureat=353.)

For my part, I like to imagine the land as contemplating itself through our gaze; and the individual as a manifestation of Nature’s faith in itself.

Excerpts accompanying each section of the piece:

i return to you my naked body
riddle its night with vital sap

  a thousand creaking mouths the North
opens multi-bladed glacial flower

WE will hold ransom for a hundred nights
the   LAND   QUEBEC

vast cradle of the icefields
deep dormitory of nickel and copper stars

  o mother and my birthright my   downfall

murmuring beneath the foam of words

returned to the denued language
to your face o earth whose silence equals my own

(Paul Chamberland. Terre Québec. Ottawa: Librairie Déom, 1964)
English translations by Diana Tyndale.

Poème d’appartenance à été composée à l’hiver 2008 et a été créée le 25 juin 2008 dans le cadre du 6e Programme des jeunes compositeurs du Centre national des Arts par l’Orchestre de la francophonie canadienne à la salle Southam à Ottawa (Ontario, Canada).

Performances

• Envoi → Dec 15, 2009