Composition in 2020 (April to July)
Commissioned by “Les Pincées Musicales”
Duration: about 5 minutes
Creation: November 8, 2020 at the “Maison des Pratiques Amateurs”, 4, rue Félibien, 75006 - Paris

Comments :

This piece was composed under very specific circumstances. In fact, due to the pandemic (Covid 19), confinement had just been decreed in France (on March 23, 2020) when Florentino Calvo unexpectedly commissioned me for this work. During the weeks of confinement and the following ones, I was able to benefit from conditions that were very favorable to artistic creation, and conducive to sustained concentration thanks to the almost total availability of my days. It was a privileged moment but at the same time a very difficult period to live because of the drama around and the stress.

About the title :

I first thought of this music as being a playful conversation between the various instruments, on a fairly rhythmic but somewhat lame and very syncopated background.
In the course of my work, the sound of the mandolins, so luminous, evoked the idea of shining. I then thought of a fragment of verse by Rimbaud, from Le Bateau ivre: "under the gleams of the day".
While composing this score, no marine image crossed my mind: the idea of gleaming is enough for me. But all in all, if we want to see in it the play of light on the surface of the sea, this music, which culminates in a ringing chorale, can undoubtedly find meaning in it.

About the shape :

There is no pre-established shape. In a book entitled “Debussy-Lettres” (Hermann editions, page 166) this statement appears: "I am convinced more and more that music is not in its essence something that can flow in a rigorous and traditional form. It is of rhythmic colors and times”.

Here it is possible to think of a spiral shape with well-typed elements which are always modified as the piece unfolds. But neither would it be wrong to detect in it the spirit of an arched form.
One can notice harmonic fields likely to undergo successive transpositions which raise them towards the acute, or on the contrary lower them when it comes to the other side of the arch.