For oboe, clarinet, low clarinet, percussion, viola and tape, Cologne (1994)

Paris, October 26, 1993

The tape of Porte ouverte sur ville is partly made hazardous withdrawals of radio. When in my car I switch on the radio starts to speak and I extinguish it immediately: during one second, I had a withdrawal of the world, a bit of sentence or music, emotion or set language. Irrational, this moment is seized, imbricated in my present, it is an appearance.

The tape is also made with the opening and closing of a door or a window, appearance of the city. Sudden appearance of a fragment of reality. Somebody walks in this scattering and symbolizes the presence of the observer. Finally musical “abstract” sounds mix with realistic fabric and create distances or depths of field.

As for the musicians, it is a true counterpoint they play, approaching or being integrated into the sounds of the tape, in a dialogue with them or, on the opposite, living their independent life, ignoring it or even contradicting it.

It is not known if Porte ouverte sur ville is an opening or a closing. Probably there is of both, that’s what makes the disordered and somewhat pessimist character of this composition.

Cologne, March 24, 1993

I read the following text (Julio Cortazar: Cronopes et Famous)

“… When I open the door, when I go out on the stage, I will know that downstairs the street starts (…), alive forest where each moment can fall on me like a flower magnolia, where the faces will be born from the moment when I look at them (…), and that step by step I will risk my life to go to buy the newspaper at the next kiosk.”

Paris, January 31, 1993

… where the noise of the media is so much invading that one has sorrow to hear the noises of the life.

Cologne, June 24, 1993

The rumors of the city replaced the voices of the sky. Radios and TVS became the true words of God. People are packed up by the divine words. Neither more nor less than before with the beliefs and the churches/religions, but what makes them still more dependent and fragile is that these words are not stable, they change all the time and get out of fashion by themselves.

And the people in it, they try to find their way, they try to think, act, play, can they still have feelings, suffer, is the pleasure not already a thing of the past, is the word still possible?

And at the end of the visit one throws them away, because there is no more place for the memory.

Cologne, March 29, 1993

Last evening I was in a Spanish restaurant, there was an ordinary ritual of restaurant, with people who entered, others who left, the ones ordered, the others paid, the conversations were fluctuating and renewed. Only one thing was fixed: a man at the bar did nothing but drink and every ten minutes, like a perfect tautologist, he went to the toilets.

There was also in the sound system a Spanish song, I remember, who always said: finished the love finished the love finished the love, she said only that. And I thought at our end of 20th century, where the love finishes.