Program note

What music should I compose? For twenty-five years now, I have asked myself this question every day. Perhaps it is a way of keeping myself from becoming dizzy with another, far more difficult question: how should one live? In composition, I feel as though I enjoy complete freedom; musical material offers no resistance, and I shape it as I see fit, unlike the raw material of existence—how much control do we really have over time, over things, over other people? Yes, I can compose whatever I want; but does that mean I should compose just any music? Does it all amount to the same thing? Of course not. Otherwise, I would have built my house on a cloud—though, come to think of it, perhaps I have.

Over the years, I have set myself various goals, sometimes contradictory ones. I have wanted to “get to the bottom” of a particular material; I have wanted to reveal some hidden and mysterious truth; I have wanted to move or seduce certain performers and certain audiences; I have wanted to fill some gap—real or imagined—in the repertoire; I have wanted to compose a music born of Montreal, a music in which the work of my colleagues and friends would resonate, the music of the community we form. And yet some obsessions—material or conceptual—keep returning, ideas I am beginning to suspect I will never get rid of.

In Miroir miroir, I tried to grapple directly with these obsessions and manipulate them as though I were someone else. The result is a music that contains several other musics, colliding and contradicting one another: an infinite mise en abyme.

Miroir miroir was commissioned by Ensemble Paramirabo with the support of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.