Memorized Sounds

“We had the idea to take a small road climbing a rocky mountain for ten kilometres.

After having climbed the last swirl, an entirely unexpected landscape opened in front of my eyes. It was sunset. In front of us, a gigantic plateau widened with sweet curves until the horizon, until the sun. The colours reached from the yellow of the dry grass to the mauve in the distance, passing by the black of the few small forests, which accentuated the space. Nearly empty nature offered itself to the eye without any obstacle. We could see everything.

Later on, when I remember this place and the feelings I had when i discovered it, I tried to compose a piece, which would be able to bring it back to life.

The Causse Mejean is a high plateau of an altitude of about 1000 metres in the Massif Central. It is located by using some distant and hardly visible farms; you could only see some shepherds who slowly lead their flocks of sheep. I wanted to accentuate this lonely and diffuse human presence with fragments of conversations that I had with some of the shepherds.

The human language is integrated into the musical texture; the sound of the voice says much more than what is really said.

One of the shepherds said one day: “I am never bored. I listen to the landscape. Sometimes I blow into my flute and I listen to the echo which talks to me…”

While thinking of him, I used the flute and its echo in my music.”

Luc Ferrari. October 18th, 2002