Drapé de nuit (night drape) for Piano and string orchestra

Hello everyone, I hope you are doing well.

This simple lullaby on a single chord to illustrate my father's photos.

This little thing comes from an improvisation at the beginning.

Don't look for more than a contemplative moment in the service of images.

Hey Jean @Krisp,

It’s a piece I admire. As I have mentioned on YouTube, for me it’s a bit different from your usual style as you take a warmer approach here, but no less (or for even more) wonderful. It’s a great piece built with a seemingly simple harmonic structure. The Lydian A major is very nice and the beginning piano solo is already very captivating. Those rests, as you mentioned are very contemplative. For me it even creates the aura like Debussy’s Cathedral Prelude. 

The joining of the strings makes it even more amazing, first the double bass, and those wonderful flute-like artificial harmonies of the violins! The development is so well paved here, never abrupt or unreasonable but only makes the music slightly more and more climactic. I wholeheartedly enjoy the music and feel myself fully immerse in it, in addition to the wonderful pictures your father took.

And happy birthday to your father! 

Thx for sharing this wonderful music to us!

Henry

On 12/22/2024 at 12:18 PM, Henry Ng Tsz Kiu said:

Hey Jean @Krisp,

It’s a piece I admire. As I have mentioned on YouTube, for me it’s a bit different from your usual style as you take a warmer approach here, but no less (or for even more) wonderful. It’s a great piece built with a seemingly simple harmonic structure. The Lydian A major is very nice and the beginning piano solo is already very captivating. Those rests, as you mentioned are very contemplative. For me it even creates the aura like Debussy’s Cathedral Prelude. 

The joining of the strings makes it even more amazing, first the double bass, and those wonderful flute-like artificial harmonies of the violins! The development is so well paved here, never abrupt or unreasonable but only makes the music slightly more and more climactic. I wholeheartedly enjoy the music and feel myself fully immerse in it, in addition to the wonderful pictures your father took.

And happy birthday to your father! 

Thx for sharing this wonderful music to us!

Henry

 

You're absolutely right.

I left aside all irony and the squeaks that are familiar to me for this evocation of my father's work. He is a very sweet person, very quiet, who tirelessly travels his country paths with his camera on his shoulder. When he was young, he took a lot of street photos, in Montparnasse, in Paris, in the suburbs, scenes of daily life near where we lived. It was the 50s, 60s, 70s, a time today very distant so much the cities have changed here in France. In the 1970s, in France, the physiognomy of some suburbs was still almost rural, often working-class neighbourhoods, a very popular France, immortalised by the great post-war photographers, humanist and realistic.

My father, some of whose photos were used for press publications because he was in an agency, belongs to a generation younger than this current, but his expression was still impregnated with it.

Today, of more fragile health, his approach is calm, as I said. Paths, nature, and this small plant world has become the theatre of its colourist, impressionist expression, and its portraits are no longer humans but flowers, leaves, trees.

With this in mind when writing my notes, I could not imagine anything other than a lullaby. The Lydian is very soft, very posed to my ears, despite the attraction towards the fifth that adds like a sensitive second in the scale. A doubly sensitive to express sensitive things...

That's it, in any case thank you and thank you again for your beautiful comment!

Oh so very lovely ......

Mark

Hi @Krisp!

I love the mostly lydian flavor!  It gives it a certain sense of awe and wonder.  And your fathers photographs are a perfect foreground to the music.  Thanks for sharing!

Oh thanks!
Yes, it was a tender break.

Thank you very much!