Improvisation is very important to me. Enghein Fields is an alternative classical improvisation influenced by the South African jazz band Batsumi. It was New Year's Eve, I watched the famous Japanese film Drive my Car, fell asleep and to my surprise woke up at five in the morning. Almost in a hypnagogic state, I went to my studio and, sitting down at the piano, improvised various chord sequences for 12 minutes, then added a bass line, violin and drum parts, creating a kind of sound painting. A bunch of sounds hanging freely in space-time emerged. I get tired and bored by complete precision in music, for example, quantization of rhythm, which makes everything sterile and uninteresting. I have the feeling that our world is not at all full of harmony, precision and clear control at the moment, but rather complete chaos and uncertainty. So I invite the audience to indulge in the apparent chaos of this music. If I, as a composer, choose a precisely notated score as my starting point, I need to decode the freedom and uncertainty from the musical notation. On the other hand, if I choose a freely generated sound and feeling as my starting point, something different emerges. I am not saying that this approach is particularly original or revolutionary, but it took me a long time, as an academically educated musician, to capture this nerve of freedom. The piece was composed in 2023 as part of the cycle “Music for an Unrealized Happy Ending”. I was in a very peculiar period in my life, emotionally and romantically, which lasted about a year and a half.
Eugene on the composition Courances:
Courances is where I spent the first few months of the Covid pandemic. I had to leave London and move to a farm in the north-west of France. For some, it would be an apocalyptic vision, but for me, a very extroverted person, it seemed like a real blessing – not talking to other people, learning how to roast coffee and dig potatoes, walking in the forest every day. I lived in a house right next to the village church. It was closed to worshipers, but since the house and the church were connected by a door (you see, a pastor used to live in this building), I took the opportunity and sneaked in there with my violin and recording equipment. Courances is the culmination of my emotional experience at that time – sudden introversion, deep loneliness, detachment from others, fear, uncertainty, because the early stages of Covid were a very uncertain period. This is the moment my world stopped.
Eugene on the composition Concerto gross // the bell rings:
There are several quotes in this composition, for example, at the end you can hear near quotations from Sibelius's Violin Concerto. The work is in three parts with a zone of peace and static in the middle. Initially improvised, later through-composed, I improvised at the violin and piano simultaneously. I wrote it in this small apartment, the windows of which looked out onto the beautiful gardens of the Palais-Royal. There, in the center of Paris, opposite the Louvre, we were in the midts of iconic establishment, like the Café Corazza, where the Jacobins used to meet before the French Revolution. I wanted to limit myself, and while playing the violin, I pulled the bow so that I could touch the piano keys at any time, holding down the right pedal. I tried to play both instruments at the same time, I recorded several versions. Since these versions are layered on top of each other, the illusion of a concert is created with several violins and pianos sounding simultaneously. This work, compared to the others you hear tonight, is more akin to academic music.
Eugene on the composition 75006 Noble Savage:
The artist Camille Pozzo di Borgo was holding an exhibition in Paris, and I was commissioned to make some musical vignettes to accompany the artwork. One of these works depicts a noble primate, I’m not a zoologist, so I won’t say for sure whether it’s a chimpanzee or some other ape, but the layered image, identical prints but in yellow, blue and red, made the image a bit abstract. I was fascinated by the grace and peace of the depicted animal, being in France, thinking of Rousseau, writing it in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, so the title also includes the postal code 75006. When you listen to this short piece, you will hear a specific chord, including a seventh interval, that reminded me of the sounds made by the monkey in the image. I tried to show the character of this noble, sentimental, generous, kind animal, contrasting it with the stereotype that animals are dangerous and untrustworthy. This specific sound is the quintessence of the small piece.