Les couleurs de l’hiver

Les couleurs de l’hiver was originally inspired by a comment made by Simon Rivet when he gave a presentation at the University of Ottawa a few years ago. Simon mentioned that he had tried to create a movement with little or no sense of direction. While a sense of direction has always been a strong feature of my own music, I had been experimenting with passages and short movements that seemed to suspend time. There are passages that do this in my solo piano piece “Remember”. In several recent recent pieces, I have written shorter movements that are either excruciatingly slow or apparently without direction. These can be found in “The Angels’ Share” for piano and marimba, “The Passage of Time” for marimba and guitar, and  “and one thing leads to another” for harp and percussion.

My goal, with Les couleurs de l’hiver  was to create a longer piece, 10 minutes, that also had a negligible sense of direction. I used very slow meters, progressive changes of timbre and (hopefully) lots of lush, beautiful sonorities. To be quite honest, I did not succeed. There is a clear climax and dénouement, as  the piece suddenly explodes from it’s lush stillness into a brief moment of chaos. You can’t miss it! Then it reverts back to the stillness and quietly ends.

The explosive climax is improvised. Curiously, in the wonderful performance on Feb. 15, 2025, by Ensemble Prisme, this improvised section seemed to require almost no rehearsal. They just did it the way I wanted with very little additional comment. Sadly, this performance was not recorded, and I have no current prospects for a new performance. The accompanying recording is Finale playback, with a lot of tweaking. I created a version of the improvised section, but it is less good than the actual performance, as is, of course, the rest of the digital mock-up.