Et Dieu créa la femme (And God Created Woman)

This not easily approachable score offers a less than flattering view of the “feminine miracle” from the erotic perspective of the man.

The impulse behind the piece came not so much from the sacred text, Genesis 2:22, as from the 1956 film of the same name starring Brigitte Bardot, in which Roger Vadim explores, without indulgence, a feminine psychological archetype grounded in concupiscence, hypersexuality, caprice, instability, unpredictability, irreverence, pride, selfishness, and sadism, a sophisticated and incomprehensible figure who nevertheless proves capable, against all expectations, of genuine love and total passion. Across the Atlantic, the French production was deemed so shocking that the American promoters felt compelled to augment the poster title, “And God Created Woman,” with the wry addition “but the devil invented Brigitte Bardot,” a phrase that must have served equally as teaser and disclaimer.

My piece, however, does not follow Vadim’s character. In a complementary manner, it approximates an imaginary and non-exhaustive journey through the states experienced by the man in love. From the innocent games of childhood, Amourette d’enfance, where sensuality remains highly debatable and is in any case overshadowed by play, through the repressed tumult of adolescence, Une fille, un reve, a period in which the oneiric element deforms and in large measure substitutes for erotic experience, the lover in my musical text eventually reaches the consummation of the long-desired bodily union, Chant d’Amour, and the brutal awakening from an opiate dream whose substance he had never doubted, Postlude triste.

The music of these sections engages, respectively, with American minimalism, Italian bruitism, and an instrumental reincarnation of Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète; then with Bartókian fury and a Germanic vein of late Romanticism; and finally with the improbable lyricism of Olivier Messiaen, especially the sonorities of Jardin du sommeil d’amour. Last but not least, the closing music, perhaps a species of domestic storm, though I did not conceive the composition programmatically, carries a harsh Siberian-tundra scent through its veiled allusions to Stravinsky’s virulence and Shostakovich’s dissonances.

I remain not entirely convinced either by the present form or by the content of this “essay for strings,” written in 2003. A readjustment, reassembly, or even outright recomposition of the musical material, though not imminent, remains entirely possible.