Attempting music since forever

Orchestra piece

Commissioned and premiered by the Orchestra of the University of Geneva

Premiere: May 2026, Salle Frank Martin, Geneva

ATTEMPTING M. explores the orchestra as a single organism made up of a multitude of individuals. The piece reflects on what it means to play together: how a collective can act as one while allowing the individuality of its members to remain perceptible, and how the codes, rituals, memories, and inheritances of the orchestral tradition continue to inhabit the present.

The work takes as its starting point the shared breath that precedes sound—the moment in which the ensemble prepares to play together.

Drawing on gestures usually considered extra-musical—the preparatory upbeat, the collective inhalation, the tension and release before the first attack—the piece develops both its sonic and physical material. Like an orchestra endlessly attempting to begin, certain fragments return in cycles: repeated trials, suspended gestures, and beginnings that never fully arrive.

Gradually, these gestures transform and unfold into a more rhythmic texture, eventually revealing a distant and distorted quotation from Schumann. Appearing like a blurred recollection of the classical tradition, it emerges as a sonic ghost between two eras, like a radio transmission disrupted by interference, where musical memory and the present moment seem to overlap.

Documentation and teaser coming soon