Leçons du petit jour: pour orgue à 2 ou 3 claviers

Score title

Composer

Betsy Jolas

More about the composer

Betsy Jolas

Date

2007

Instrumentation

Organ

Library copy

Borrow from UMKC Libraries

Program note

"Nightaway, Diurnes, Points of dawn, Daymusic..." such titles found all along my production must have made it clear: I am a "morning person."

I DON'T LIKE NIGHT

Always before dawn, my mind and ears on the lookout, I take daily pleasure in capturing the sounds of the sleeping "megapole:" distant calls, lovesick cats, lone cars, rustling, crackling... rare sounds surrounded with silence and strangely set off against an indistinct rumor.
I listen with attention and ponder. What can I make of all this?
Above all learn these lessons well; they are lessons of light not of darkness; then recite them, sing them.
My childhood beloved instrument, the organ, seems ideally suited to such solitary meditation. I can already imagine here the unusual sonorities of a baroque organ ringing in an empty church.
I begin to compose. I think of Bach. Of Messiaen, my mentor; of his "64 durées" filled with bird songs.
For there are birds also in my own daybreak. Not the lovely birds Messiaen so loved, and from whom he claimed having learned so much, but only ugly Parisian pigeons and their sad, endless cooing. I like to think that thus clearly evoking them, will at least give me the illusion of having mastered them, of having warded them off, if only for the duration of the piece. And so here they are, as it were, "immortalized," and once again on the obsessive pitch of all my keyboard works: middle G.

-Betsy Jolas