Musical works

A sad, clean, old-fashioned apartment perched atop a modern building. A party, guests, small talk—boredom revealing its cracks in every detail. The apartment empties. I find myself in the corner of a room. A small woman stands before me, blocking my path. Impatient, I crumple her up. Disgusted by my violent gesture, I make a decision: “It’s time to end this dream—I’ll jump out the window, and the fall will wake me.” I leap through the glass, but instead of falling, I soar above the city. I fly for a long time, crossing the boundary between the city and “the other world.”

This other world is a river—perhaps an ocean—teeming with islands of mysterious shapes. In the distance, I hear an extraordinary song. I would later learn that this song belongs to one of the peoples of the islands, whose throats, formed of “petals of flesh,” allow them to sing five different pitches at once. But what I heard was even more wondrous: when one of them is born, instead of crying, they open their fleshy flower and begin to sing. What I heard was a birth song.

This song, one of the most beautiful I have ever heard, I attempted—an impossible task—to write down, to bring to life in the reality of sound. Ne t’éveille pas de ton rêve… is a piece of music that seeks the dream from which it was born, moving through the weight of waking life in hopes of brushing against a few clearings from elsewhere.