mes pleurants [2020]

for piano

duration :: 13’

Written for Ben Smith

First performance :: Ben Smith — 9 June 2021 — Durham University [online stream]

Score published by Edition Gravis

Pleurants: small figures surrounding the tombs of powerful personages, particularly in late-medieval Burgundy: "figures of mourning" in gently twisted posture, folds of cloth, faces often hidden, an expression of the most private, withheld forces publicly expressed. Mes pleurants: my weepers: settings of fragments of chansons that were more or less contemporary with the sculptural pleurant practice, disintegrated into dust and into a private and hieratic practice perceptible to you only with its face turned, as contorted robes.

 In addition to the two central pleurants, performed consecutively, there are two marginal satellites found elsewhere: fragmentary, slippery, parenthetical ghosts of the chanson "Se Zephirus" by the fourteenth-century composer Grimace. These disjecta membra are meant to cast a shadow.