..à mesure, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, vibraphone and piano (1996)

The work of composition, focused, in the vey firs insistance, on preoccupations in the rhytmic domain, continues with …à mesure, a sextet composed en 1997 whose instrumental complement is the same as in Pour Luigi (the two pieces forming a pair thenceforth), withe the addotional contribution of a vibraphone. The composer defines …à mesure as the "negative of Pour Luigi, in the sense that the pieces are "mutually complementary; so, for example, we can note that the "orchestrating" piaon of Pour Luigi takes on thereafter a solo part, and that while, in the firs work, there is a contrast between yhe overall blending of the sound and the chiseled textures of the separate timbres, this stands in opposition to the work on the instrumental couple in …à mesure (initially by the "affinity in registers" flute-violin, bass clarinet-cello, piano-vibraphone, thereafter by "affinity in techniques" the two winds, the two strings, the two "percussions") in many ways, though …à mesure is more and extension of the work associated with it than in opposition to it. On the one hand, the rhytmic and harmonic materials take on a jubilant heterogeneity: according to the composer, "short pulsating rhytmic sequences, each in turn accompagnied by rhytmic accelerations and decelerations comming from a different musical univers", mix with abundant rythmic polyphonies which ultimately 'settle firmly into loops". On the other hand, the programmed network of relationships which typically impose an exclusive determination on the music's development (layering processes) leave room for the temptation of "unknown situations" deduced from the works of development in its traditional sense, and intgrated in a forme which  "offers a game of anticipations ans returns to the past close to movie flash-backs". The title refers to this double resonance in the work of the factor of rythm and the material's desintegration "as it plays out, like a sculptor who renders visible the object he wants to see, here, octaves, already set out in  the work's  central climax".

Éric Denut, translated by Nikki Halpern