Program note

The title is a reference to Godard's Masculin-Féminin (1966), an account of the social climate of the 1960s, captured in a film midway between love drama and documentary. My composition merely follows its formal design (including the suggested division into 15 chapters and a quote halfway through) without seeking to express its content. Yet one could hear the sharp contrasts between the successive scenes of this work as those between characters, or those between politics and commerce in this film - which is, after all, about the "children of Marx and Coca-Cola". The quote in the film (quoted again in the score) comes from a play by Jean Girandoux: Pour Lucrèce (1953): 'La purité n'est pas de ce monde, mais tous les dix ans, il y a sa lueur, son éclair' (Purity is not of this world, but every ten years there is a glimpse, a flash), very apt for the high-risk passages in which extremely soft and fragile dyad multiphonics feature prominently.

scored for:

• clarinet in B flat
• bass clarinet in B flat

Duration:

ca. 12 minutes

First performance:

21 June 2025, Academiehuis Zwolle, by Peter-Marc Dijcks, clarinet and (pre-recorded) bass clarinet

Peter-Marc Dijcks in rehearsal

Score example

page 10 of the score (with film quote)