DESCRIPTION:
Performance by Wilhem Latchoumia at CCRMA. October 15, 2013
Max Bruckert, electronics.
Part of a US tour organized by GRAME (www.grame.fr), supported by FACE Council.
Info and program notes: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/events/grame-presents-wilhem-latchoumia-piano-electronics

- Commissioned by the Festival of contemporary music of Badajoz (Spain), 2010.

This miniature for a solo piano was first written in 2010 in the frame
of a project, led by a Spanish festival director, Daniel Hugo
Sprintz. Each of the selected composers had to work with an
imposed ensemble and a given color (for me, black). During the
performance, four or five painters from Badajoz would improvise
on their canvas, as if seismically recording their listening.

This commission came to me at the right time, since I was
studying the black color and its place in the arts history, and
also interacting with the artist Pierre Masbanaji, who has been
working for long with India ink. His Armenian origins crossing
mine, we also found a link with a dark cloth's gleam, in which
still shines undoubtedly this stone or volcanic glass that one
can find in Armenia, which is obsidian; a kind of black crystal
that still produces its magic on me.

This miniature's subtitle, "The anatomy of..." comes from Robert
Burton's work. That makes its part of a cycle, even informal,
whose framework is to follow some given proportions inside a
magic square, drawn in a famous engraving on which stands an
enigmatic polyhedron. Darkness is this cave through which I
weave and raises the growth of some fiber lights without forgetting
the presence of this healthy song, sometimes devoted to dance
by some resistant fireflies. We often forget that our origin takes
shape inside a dark nucleus. So there is something fundamental
in this place where we come to life, then doomed to blindness and
bellow, to accelerating frenzy of ambition, getting to its decay
without any doubt.