Les Ombres errantes

Les Ombres errantes is the version for clarinet, horn and piano of the trio Les Ombres qui passant for violin, cello (or viola) and piano, a trio which also exists under the name Cortège des ombres for clarinet, viola and piano.

Les Ombres errantes contrasts a typically clockwork central movement with two movements of almost twilight slowness, which decline a theme made up of deliberately disjointed, almost Webernian intervals (sometimes augmented fourths, often major sevenths) but in a broader tonal context. It is the combination of this angular melodic profile with clear harmonies (first movement), with a very slow harmonic rhythm (third movement) that gives this trio its half-tone atmosphere.

The central movement, on the contrary, is one of energy, conciseness and tightness – at first I thought of calling it stretto .

For humor, but also out of a taste for mystifications, I once wrote a brief presentation of this Trio that parodied certain abstruse comments while seeking as much as possible to respect scientific rigor. Considering that the statute of limitations has expired, I cannot resist the urge to republish this hoax:
"This trio illustrates the general idea of transforming one group of chords into another, according to the principles of thermodynamics in an adiabatic medium. The first movement is based on the first principle: ΔU = 0, U being by analogy a torsion factor calculated according to the valences of each note of a chord, themselves linked to the phenomena of acoustic resonance (the more consonant an interval is, the lower its valence; the unison has a valence of 0, the octave of 2, etc.) If the first movement conserves the overall energy, the second, on the other hand, conserves the entropy, in accordance with the second principle of thermodynamics: ΔH = 0. We have thus introduced one or more statistical matrices accounting for the fundamental uncertainty due to the circumstances of temperature (tempo) and pressure (dynamics). The third movement explores what the first principle could be in a non-adiabatic medium: energy is not constant, friction between elements and kinetic retarders are introduced.