Ici-bas (Here Below)

Inspired by Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962), Ici-bas is a non-liturgical musical work grounded in religious themes.

It is linked to Britten’s opus, which served both as model and as creative impetus, by affinities of approach, namely the vocal-symphonic genre, the concert setting, and the use of a Western Church service as compositional frame of reference — here the litany, a memorial office — but above all by conceptual affinities. Like Britten’s Requiem, my work opposes, through the literary text sung by the eight solo soloists, the sacred, spiritual world, concretely the Christian one, to the secular and desacralized world, trapped in a vicious circle of contemplating its own imminent end, vanity, and despair, all of which it in fact nourishes and amplifies.

The former is represented by a hymn to the Virgin Mary, drawn from Viridarium Marianum septemplici rosario, variis exercitiis, exemplis ut plantationibus peramoenum, after Gasparem Bellerum, 1615, and the latter by René-François Sully-Prudhomme’s poem Ici-bas, which also gives the work its title.

Unlike Britten, however, who chose to deepen and explore the conflict, my own option was to expose and dismantle it, in order to sustain the thesis that nourishes, on a philosophical plane, almost all the works I have written in recent years: namely, that the secular world is its own executioner, and the sole cause of its unhappiness, precisely through expelling the sacred dimension, the only source of meaning, from its existence. This is how the final sequence of the work should be understood, where the two apparently irreconcilable factions, the women’s solo voices and the men’s, though each held captive by a single literary source, seem to converge semantically: the women sing “Amen,” while the men, at the same time, sing “Toujours,” almost as a kind of secular, powerless Amen, yet one that still reveals the human being’s apodictic longing, however fallen or estranged from God, for original inextricability.

The piece stubbornly withdraws from a narrative idiom, despite owing its existence to such an impulse. A vocal-instrumental work, especially one in which the voice sings text rather than mere vocalise, as in Debussy’s coloristic uses of it, promises, if not outright owes, a strong dramaturgy and a corresponding narrativity. Yet through a sustained refusal, Ici-bas chooses instead to dwell in an uncertain territory somewhere between dream and contemplation, between ascesis and abandonment. Somewhat like Byzantine icons, it declines on principle the invitation to pictorialize any mundane affect: irony, laughter, sarcasm, passion, none of these. Nothing beyond the contemplation of God. The result is an austere music poised on the threshold between the sublime and the decayed, between flight and restraint, an interminable virtuality containing within itself the motors of its own arrested ascent: an immobile upward vector, a perpetual preparation for a flight never begun.

Ici-bas is music that does not dare to live, yet cannot bear to die. It persists, therefore, suspended at the juncture of two worlds, silently hoping for some external help to pull it toward one side or the other. But help never comes, and its sound ultimately dies away into the modesty from which it first emerged, and into the muffled regret of never having truly dared to be. It mirrors the human condition in contemporaneity: called to a divinity it has refused, only to mourn that refusal for an eternity afterward, and finding in the resigned quietude of inward, deeply hidden lament its sole consolation.

Contrary to all expectations, the world below, the terrestrial realm, the lament of fallen human existence, is treated less dramatically than mockingly, something easily observed in the orchestration’s Hollywood allusions. The intention is a scholastic one, drawing deliberately on a strand of Western systematic theology: the source of unhappiness in this vale of tears lies in the continued refusal of the sacred, of Christ’s restorative act. Consequently, any lament that does not entail penitence and reorientation along an ascending vector is futile and even faintly ludicrous, because it already contains within itself the guarantee of the unhappiness it laments.

Ici-bas is an eikon of wandering between two worlds, the spiritual one, immutable, ecstatic, radiant, and the material one, caught in perpetual decline, disintegration, and disenchantment. Though built upon opposition, it does not seek to intensify the antagonism between these two realities so much as to render the human condition itself, forever wavering between transcendence and immanence. Ultimately, the music proposes the elevation of the human being toward the celestial, toward the spiritual, concretely, through the text, toward Christ, as the answer to the insatiability of the world down here (“Whoever drinks of this water will thirst again” — John 4:13).