L’art de toucher le clavecin, 1 [2021]

for piccolo

duration :: 4’30”

L’art de toucher le clavecin is the title of a famous instructional pamphlet by François Couperin, the master claveciniste of the French Baroque, which gives a concise but invaluable guide to interpretation, performance, and ornamentation of the singular keyboard music of that time and place.

The present series of works (this piccolo solo, a duet for piccolo with violin, and a third for piccolo with violin and percussion) forms, I suppose, some sort of oblique homage to Couperin’s aesthetic of ornamented surface, of a simple ground-gesture that is forced to proliferate if it wants to inhabit a space.  Most obviously, there is “melodic” ornamentation everywhere, not only where one expects to see it—in the form of trills, mordents, and other related figures adorning fundamentally simple gestures of pitch and breath—but also in the structure of the pieces, which take the form of a fitful and gap-filled flowering of a small stable of “stock figures.” 

The trio L'art de toucher le clavecin, 3 was written in 2011 as an expansion, a dilation of the piccolo-violin duo L'art de toucher le clavecin, 2 (2009); a decade later, this solo is the opposite: not quite a contraction of the originary duo but a drying out, a withdrawal into husks of potential. As such it feels, to me, unstable, teetering, tensely incomplete: the lyrical balance of the duo and the dilatory wanderings of the trio washed away by the intervening years?