The Song of the Seven Towers

While reading Le Chant des Sept Tours, the Debussy String Quartet was struck by the power of Laurent Gaudé’s text and immediately heard a music that emerged from the poems, a minimalist, almost mystical music that would sublimate the force of the text. Music like the one of Henryk Górecki or Osvaldo Golijov, whose depth pushes one to think.

The form of the Song of the Seven Towers, brief, which underlines the effectiveness of the text, questions the one of a show. The idea of a rapprochement towards the oratorio emerges then: the text would be declaimed, sung, recited on the music, offering a singular relation between the voice and the instruments, between support and fight, in the image of a slave who would attempt to resist his condition by speaking over the deaf harmonies.