Composers

For Antoine Tisné, musical creation is an essential ferment of existence and a way of belonging to the world.

Whether he contemplates, explores or questions the world, he puts his feelings, his approaches and his doubts into a musical form through which he communes intimately with the universe.

Can we guess the secret man ?
the abounding work ?

When we discover the work, it enthralls us :

pure durations,
constrating masses,
rhythms,
stresses.

When we penetrate it, we are intrigued or fascinated :

narrative or symbolism ?
epic or meditation ?

Hearing it, in the same way as we listen to the world, we may feel anxious or exhilarated.

From his frequent travels in Greece, Afghanistan, Spain, Kenya and India, Antoine Tisné always brings back some new work which evokes a place but draws its underlying inspiration from myths or from the genius loci.

After a long gestation (from 1972 to 1975), the spiritual mood of Celebration I combines the serenity of the mystic call of Mount Ahtos and the purity of the azure lakes of Band-i-amir.

Its swirling sonorous traceries,
slashed with bells and stridency,
fade into infinity, like prayers.

Elsewhere, the chant consecrates the hours of a long memory ; Sequences pour Ellora, written in 1969, after a visit to India, and Music for Stonehenge (1975) are as disturbing and fascinating as the places which inspired them. The ambiguous voices of the clarinet or the saxophone, both ample (volume, range and polyphony) and fragmented (flutter-tonguing and artificial resonnances) are strangely moving.

The observer ‘s eye is always accompanied by the dreamer’s meditation.

The composer’s method structures the imagination of the intuitive.

From painting,

with its immediate and lasting power, he draws structural devices - spatial balance, constrating masses and a focus of attraction.

In the pieces which it has inspired - Etudes d’après Goya (1966), Les muses inquiètantes (1976) and Cimaises (1967) - it brings the vitality of juxtaposition, mobility of rhythm and internal tension.

From poetry,

with its truth and mysteries, he discovers secret sources of images and symbols. Several poets - including Rilke, Baudelaire and, in this century, Cendrars, Char, Daumal, Reverdy, Masson and Niemann - have given him ideas for musical transpositions or illustrations, such as songs, a lyric poem and chamber music with a speaker.

The modern myth of Bocephal (a poem by David Niemann) made a strong impresssion on him, and he extracted from it the essence of musical symbolism. Figures
symbolising the static, torture or light,
ponctuate and stress this narrative suite, permeated with human agony.

Even in Antoine Tisné’s «pure» music, an underlying drama filters through.

Affectivity, such as a sensation of fear in the cello concerto,
of oppression or melancholy in the viola concerto,
and vivid indications of symphonic movements

enhances genres which at first admit their materiality. Tisné does not however reject the latter, and cultivates the pleasure of the sovereign master of ceremonies in relationships between sounds,

in the play of timbres and virtuosity,
in the balance between order and aleatory.

To assimilate its codes better (en perhaps also to master a natural expressionism) he began by subjecting his language to the austere rules of serialism. He abandoned it a decade ago, confident in the generosity of a melodic inspiration which could have been restricted by systematic censorship.

But the essential question is always that of creation. In music, and in art in general, it is a replica on a human scale of the mysterious working of the universe.

Antoine Tisné’s music is full of swirling momentum, colorful hazes and the radiance of space, particularly the pieces in which he expresses his idea of the cosmos : Cosmogonies (1967), Sidérales (1970), Pulsars éclatés (1971) and Stellae Borealis (1974). They reflect a metaphysical mind fascinated by scientific discoveries, made fertile by meditation and released, with its torments and its beliefs, by musical creation.

Pierrette GERMAIN