No birds for 12 cellos

The title of this work comes from a painting by the painter and printmaker Joan Mitchell - a response to a painting by Vincent van Gogh entitled Champ de blé avec corbeaux (Wheat Field with Crows) - a canvas in which flat areas of paint with different textures create a polyphony of colors in space. Another reference is Truinas, a long meditation by the poet Philippe Jaccottet, whose sensitive relationship with nature has always spoken to me. The death of the poet André du Bouchet, to whose funeral he went, is the source of this writing, where, in the final pages of Feuillets joints, the form of the text evokes erasure and disappearance, underscored by the final phrase: "I wonder if a bird can still pass in this sky". In its final section, the music adopts this form. A 3rd reference is the Gyrovagues by visual artist Abraham Poincheval, in which an image projected in 360° rotation is totally hypnotic. 

In No birds, a quasi-orchestral work, the constant recurrence of bird calls emerging from the instrumental mass is intended as a representation of what we could lose - and ourselves with it - if we're not careful.

At the source of the writing, few materials, little variant work, the return of the same elements in different contexts ("spiral" form) and a polyphony of highly differentiated instrumental gestures and timbres. Violent cuts, often in unison, alternate with moments of calm, reflecting the extremes of nature and humanity.