WAVES OF LIGHT

What does the voice represent in your musical world?

The voice is fundamental. It is the instrument we all share, and it is through its vibrations, colours and endless variations that I have been moved since I was very young. My relationship with music therefore began with the voice, with all the songs I heard on the radio. My ear was constantly drawn to melodic lines.

After a few years of playing the piano, I realised that when I could hear internally what I was playing — or sing it aloud — I would memorise it accurately and for a long time. As an improviser, my relationship with singing is an intimate one: everything I play or improvise on the keyboard is sung internally or hummed at the same time. This is also what I teach my students: if you can accurately sing the melody that comes to you, it becomes easy to reproduce it on your instrument.

What is your relationship with the music of the past?

The more experience I gain, the more I feel the need to return to the sources of the music I play and love. I believe we have a debt to the past. We have a responsibility to study and understand our musical heritage, which is shaped by both continuity and rupture. The music of the past is an infinite source of spiritual nourishment from which we must draw in order to keep our imagination fertile.

It allows us to develop a distinctive artistic voice, to stand by our choices and sometimes even to understand them better. It is an essential creative force that enables us to project ourselves more fully into the music of our own time.

A question for Joël Suhubiette

How did this adventure unfold for you and the choir? How did you approach this project?

Meeting Paul Lay and his jazz trio was a fascinating experience and took us into territory we had never explored before. The ensemble enjoys travelling into unknown territory. Immersing ourselves actively in the world of jazz — which most of us had previously known only as listeners — was a new experience.

There was never any question of turning us into a vocal jazz ensemble; that is not where our expertise lies, nor was that the aim. Paul knew how to make use of the choir’s sound, its experience in contemporary music and its flexibility in moving between different styles, creating genuine bridges between our identity as a “classical choir” and his jazz trio.

At certain moments, we encounter a style of writing in which the relationship between text and music is not so far removed from the repertoire we are accustomed to. But Paul also often uses the voices without text, drawing on a wholly instrumental approach that could be described as a “vocal big band”.

As a connoisseur of early music, Paul has even woven tributes to Purcell, Bach and Ligeti into the concert. But it is his composition “Waves of Light” that provides the programme’s main structure — a true gift to the choir, offering us pieces that move between exuberance, virtuosity, tenderness and melancholy. A joy!