Julien Jamet: Nuit

It’s difficult to write a program text when you don’t have an actual »program«. While composing this piece, I often felt like I didn’t know where I was or where I was going.

At the very beginning of the composition process, I imagined situations for Trio Catch, collecting scattered elements, rhythms, gestures, possible sequences, etc. In the beginning I only sketched these elements, often noting them without exact pitches or rhythms, or even more poetically-linguistically than technically-instrumentally. They are as if frozen on paper, and I don’t yet know how to bring them to life.

But little by little they begin to live in my imagination, in my dreams. So the music comes to me in images–sometimes precise, but mostly blurred, incomplete, fragmented. I feel like Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness: »I feel as if I were trying to tell you a dream, trying in vain, for never can the narration of a dream reproduce the dreamlike.«

Very little is finalized until well into the composition process, as my imagination is constantly in motion and my ideas are fleeting and contradictory. Every day I question again what I wrote the day before. The variations of an original situation thus gradually interweave to form the piece. Thus repetition plays a central role in my music, but rarely in exact form. Due to the constant re-composition of the same initial situation, the impression of a repetition is not always clear, the transformation steps usually obscured. Rather, it is a matter of giving the impression that something is familiar, but appears as if renewed with each further appearance. Like in a dream, in which the situations and events often seem familiar, but the feeling of strangeness is omnipresent, I try in my compositions to create this feeling of strangeness, of déjà vu, of vertigo, and to let the unexpected meet.

Last but not least, the use of very quiet dynamics also contributes to this aesthetic. They are–for the most part–not due to the use of inherently less sonorous playing techniques, but rather to my intention of writing music with contours that are not too pronounced, thus leaving it partly to the imagination of the listener.

Julien Jamet