Cantus for Gilles Tremblay

Cantus for Gilles Tremblay, Cantus as canticle, Cantus firmus. Tremblay’s work reminds me a break-up, a formal shift, sparkling harmonies colored by the omnipresent shadow of faith. It is this same faith – in its spiritual essence rather than the concreteness of its Christianity – which has always attracted and fascinated me, be it in the works of Penderecki and Pärt, my mentors, or within of my own creation.

Religion is as much meditation as violence, and I can not conceive of music without violence. Violence in a silence, violence in a pianissimo. A contrast that crosses the three movements of the work through a writing which combines ancient and modern elements. From the neo-Gregorian monody of the first movement and its treatment in canon to the fugue that structures the race of the third is established a set of references interspersed with gestures bursting at the piano, woven into the web of strings. At the center of Cantus, a slow movement in sustained chords and silences, paradoxically the most intense of the three: without beginning or end, frozen in a timeless elegy.

The work, commissioned by the Contemporary Music Workshop of the University of Montreal under the direction of Lorraine Vaillancourt, was created April 6, 2010.