Denis Dufour | Composer’s notes

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Dune

1981 | 08'03 | opus 21 | Maison Ona publishers

for two flutes

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• Demande de Gérard Bourgogne et Xavier Chabot

• Audition à Oullins, église Saint-Martin, le 2 avril 1988 par Jean-Luc Lhoste et Claire Levasseur

• Création en concert à Villeurbanne, Salle Gérard Philipe, le 27 mai 1989 par Pierre-Yves Artaud et Sophie Dufeutrelle

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On the dune where the exhausted sand sighs, two lounging bodies meet, snuggle, mingle and hope for each other, in the vast sleeping sun. A sort of loving struggle, a leapfrog, an erotic and spiritual hide-and-seek, an astral orbe, a chase to trap the mayfly (the beauty will be convulsive). Women’s bodies that are white as a dune, like the moon, hourglasses, stones that roll in the trough of a wave, in a cold spell, forever. One, two roses, a rise of the two. Circus and choreography, wheels and acrobatics, this short work has the gait of Tancrede and Clorinda, an erotic duel (tomorrow morning at 6 o’clock on the dune) and gnostic. And it makes us think of the palpable and simple virtuosity of Bartók’s duets, but without any reference to folklore. Have we not now penetrated into the universe of a full and ideal science-fiction? [Jérôme Nylon, translated by Hamish Hossain]