Hugues Dufourt

L'Origine du monde

Inspired by the famous painting by Gustave Courbet (1866), which had once belonged to Jacques Lacan and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay, L'Origine du monde was commissioned by the French government and premiered at the Musica Festival in Strasbourg 2004 with pianist Ancuza Aprodu and the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain (EOC) conducted by Daniel Kawka. It is in fact a concerto for piano and small ensemble focused not on pianistic virtuosity, but on a peculiar integration of the piano and instrumental sounds. The percussion is conceived as an extension to the piano's resonating chamber, giving the instrument an almost elastic appearance. The treatment of the instrumental ensemble often resembles that of a synthesized sound being integrated into the piano resonance as if into a sphere of coloured potentialities. This work was influenced by the reintroduction of spatial volume in music. It behaves like the outcome of a single malleable force eroding away its surroundings, developing its own setting and shaping its expansion like an indeterminate organisational and developmental power. The scheme is to infer evolving forms, articulated motions, and to give the listener, with singular perception, the impression of a process unfolding according to laws of generative dynamism. Time is treated in a paradoxical manner - it unfolds both slowly and quickly. Its evolution is unique, accountable to the law of internal distortion, with a contradictory character that is the source of the form. Time is dependent on variable dominants, its course is interrupted then reinstated, never ceasing to progress, sometimes oscillating, sometimes polarised, able to distend or contract in upon itself.Hugues Dufourt(Translated from the French by Jacqueline Rose)