for soprano, mezzo-soprano and ritual objects (paper, porcelain cup, metal bowl, keys)
A piece in four sections for two voices and ritual objects — arrivée · fragments · rituel · dissolution — lasting about four minutes. It was written in Strasbourg in 2026 for Ensemble Multilatérale, whose commission asked for something small enough to be carried in the hands: two singers, a sheet of paper, a porcelain cup, a metal bowl and a ring of keys.
The music must be sung with extreme intimacy and restraint. Silence is a structural material, not an absence. The pitch world is narrow — ré, mi, fa♯, la, si — built from open fifths, minor-second frictions, small repeating cells and a suspended modality whose gravity settles slowly on ré. Dynamics never rise above mp. In the outer sections the voices breathe more than they sing; in the third a soft pulse appears and the two lines become a single even chant; in the last, whispered consonants (s, ch, h) are pitched only by air, and the French fragments stay at the threshold of intelligibility.
The objects are extensions of the voice, not punctuation. The paper carries a handwritten text known only to the soprano and is never read aloud. The keys stay closed in the mezzo’s hand until the final gesture, when they are dropped into the cup. Nothing is ever louder than a breath. Un Rituel pour Oublier is a ritual for forgetting — a ceremony in which something is said almost completely, and then allowed to dissolve.