I composed La plus secrète mémoire des hommes after reading the Goncourt Prize winner Mohamed Mbougar Sarr!

The author, who really moved me, deals with the question of cultural borrowing and artistic identity, in a breathtakingly labyrinthine form.

In my Radio-Concert piece you can find colours inspired by the Blackbird:

Olivier Messiaen wrote a wonderful Blackbird in 1952 for flute and piano, and dedicated the second of his Petites esquisses d’oiseaux for piano in 1985 to the same animal.

Nina Simone performed a poignant Blackbird in 1966 accompanied only by percussion, where the bird is a metaphor for the persecuted young black American: « Why you wanna fly Blackbird you ain’t ever gonna fly ».

And of course, the Beatles in 1968, with a Blackbird that sounds like a response to Nina Simone: « Take these broken wings and learn to fly ».

During a radio exchange, Pascale Tison talks to Sylviane Hazard to trace the hypotheses of Paul McCartney’s influences – Bach, India, birdsong, Angela Davis and the struggle for African-American civil rights – and concludes by saying that « everything can be true and right too, and juxtapose… ».