Théorème
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2019
MICHEL LORAND – PASCAL QUIGNARD – FRANÇOIS COUPERIN,
FILM – LIVRE
Michel Lorand’s “Théorème“ questions the notion of “return” and through it that of our perception of time; “the past at the moment when it is added to the origin“, as Pascal Quignard says in Sur le jadis.
Michel Lorand has chosen to work on the eight preludes by François
Couperin’s eight preludes from his treatise l’Art de toucher le Clavecin, one of the most famous in early music.
In order to be as close as possible to the music, he asked the harpsichordist
Marie-Anne Dachy and the composer Jawher Matmati, to make a scrupulous transcription of the original score, of which a copy of the 1717 edition lies in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
From this new transcription it was possible to write the retrograde version of each prelude, a sort of return movement.
Lorand then filmed and recorded in the studio the different pieces played by
Marie-Anne Dachy on a harpsichord made by Jean-Luc Wolfs-Dachy
based on an instrument by Pascal Taskin (Paris 1769).
It was important for Lorand to explore in depth this temporal notion of
“return” through musical and filmic writing, but also through literary
writing. Pascal Quignard wrote an original text for this project,“Harmoniè Palintropos”, which precedes the original and retrograde scores of the preludes in this edition. The book was published by Eléments de langage.
“The return has become a song (odos) that tells the way (odos) or rather a dance that shows it. This is how the bees do it. This is the tao of honey in the origin. In the verb “neomai” the revenants dance their revenance; they do not mourn the vanished flowers; they locate the bush within the site. They pass on the position to the other workers. This dance which returns is called a “theorem” in Greek. *
* PASCAL QUIGNARD, Mourir de penser, chapter XIV, Le boomerang, 2014
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