Petite suite en Quinze images, No. 7 La Promenade en Traîneau

For some reason, I seem to really like the number 7.

Firstly, there seems to be some time/video delay – as some of you may know, my camera sorta died on me a while ago, so now the only thing it can do is record videos, which it obviously is doing with quite a lot of bugs.

C’mon guys, this is /music/, some time/video discrepancies shouldn’t irk you much if you’re not looking at the video :P

For that matter, the lighting sucked, so the only thing worth looking at at the video was Bulbasaur.

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As with most influential composers of, well, since the Renaissance, Jacques François Antoine Ibert was born in Paris. The 1890s were the start of quite an… emotionally compelling era, with German expressionism and French impressionism marking their lasting (pardon the pun) impressions on the musical industry.

Conceived in this turmoil of musical clashes, you’d expect Ibert to pick a style and stick with it; on the contrary, he was quite unattached to any style themes, preferring instead to dabble in the mishmash of genres prevalent in Parisian (and indeed, worldwide) society at the time.

This did not mean he was a bad composer at all, for he won one of the most coveted prize in musical composition – the Prix de Rome, waarded only to such geniuses as Hector Berlioz, Georges Bizet, and Claude Debussy.

After decades of productive musical establishment, the Axis-aligned Vichy Regime (of France) banned his music, and Ibert voluntarily moved to Switzerland to continue his career.

He died in 1962, when he was 71.

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In 1943, after the outbreak of war, he composed ‘Petite suite en quinze images’ – Small suite, in 15 images (I BET YA DIDN’T KNOW THAT HUH). A completely solo piano work, he delicately paints many idyllic scenes of a peaceful time. Strangely, it seems (I just can’t find good recordings for all of them) that none of them are very loud. A perfectly natural thought for one wanting to escape the war.

The 7th piece in the collection, ‘La Promenade en Traîneau’, actually means ‘the Sleigh Ride’, rather than what I thought it was; ‘the Train Station’. Because of this, I tried to evoke visualizations of a quiet train station, with the suddenness and swiftness of a train arriving and leaving in the middle of the night. It seemed so much more… obvious. Before I searched up the real translation, I just couldn’t get why everyone else was basically slamming the notes to make it stand out against the seemingly unimportant bass. Really, it was quite… disgusting. Horrifying.

But what am I, to criticise others’ perceptions? What difference what that be to brutally sabotaging others’ inner mentality? When not even I, am properly expressing the dynamical nuances, the whole… calmness of the scene.

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Yet, a train station would make much more sense. The quiet left-hand Alberti footsteps motioning the train to come faster, quicker, so that they could fially go home after a long day’s work. The sudden plunge into organized noise as the vehicle slowly slides into the platform. Quick pit-pats of shoe on ground, growing faster, louder, as swarms of people flood onto the train.

And then it’s gone.