Revealing

Patrick Giguère, musician, composer
instrumentation : symphony orchestra

duration : 7'

year of composition : 2017

about :

‘Fragile, yet determined’: the first words in Giguère’s score tell us much about what the work has in store. This is music about exposure and disclosure, of layers being gradually stripped away and of the determination and confidence that this process demands. ‘The piece is not about ‘revealing’ in the most basic sense’ says Giguère, ‘but about revealing in a more personal, intimate sense’. In other words, what is unravelled within Revealing is not the musical material but Giguère himself. From the tentative fragility of the opening, with its fractured melodies and dulled dynamics grows a work of enormous warmth and stature. As each fragment expands, little by little, the orchestra swells in size, and with the gradually-thickening texture, so the dynamics expand incrementally too, the strings permitted to play just a little more expressively as the music grows louder. While the music never rises beyond mezzo forte (this, after all, is a moment of intimacy and not of grandeur), it becomes warmer, the orchestra fleshed out and emboldened when the opening material returns. ‘If you reveal who you are to somebody else’, says Giguère, ‘you become more vulnerable, but you also make the relationship more intense, more authentic’. Thus, when we return to the opening tempo, it is with a sense of renewed stability, the fragments now linked together – made more ‘authentic’ – amidst the full breath of the orchestra. - Jo Kirkbride



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- Canadian Music Center, for score