MEMENTO

Composition: Jérôme Combier
Solo percussion/performance: Corentin Marillier

​RIM: Etienne Démoulin
Ensemble CAIRN

Premiered at Festival Musica - Strasbourg

Festival Nouvelles Traversées - Abbaye de Noirlac

Festival Propagations GMEM - Marseille

SMC Lausanne

In Memento, Jérôme Combier paints a musical still life, animated in the spirit of arte povera.

Leaves, stone, wood, metal, glass, and sand deliver sound properties on a stage resembling a large painting. Music—and its power—brings the inert objects of the still life back to life. It draws them out of the frame and brings them to our attention, as if to measure the gap between the geological time of matter and the fragile time of the human listener.

With his latest creation, Jérôme Combier echoes the Arte Povera movement and artists such as Jannis Kounellis, Giuseppe Penone, and Claudio Parmiggiani, as well as Richard Long's land art.

The concert hall becomes a surface on which islands of sound gravitate. The composition and the arrangement of things make up the work. At the center of the installation, a percussionist brings natural materials to life, manipulating them and projecting them among the instrumentalists surrounding him. Thus absorbed into the writing and the space, they become phenomena, gestures, movements. The music is then observed, exposed, sculpted, rubbed, caressed, sometimes broken.