“Giving a name to a work is always an issue. For Hypothèses du Sextuor, it happened completely randomly. I was in Japan, speaking to a couple of art curators. They had just organized an exhibition about crystal called Hypothèse du cristal. I found it really beautiful. And that concept of hypothesis seemed very appropriate for the composition of this piece. The fact that musicians can’t really coexist together all the time is one of my principles. All through the entire score, at least one instrument has a singular and personal point of view, and the sextet is never really fully reunited around a common idea – like six persons who can’t get on the same page as the Six personnages en quête d’auteur, from the Luigi Pirandello’s play.

Two events occurred during the writing of this sextet. The snow began falling in a small village of Corrèze where I started this composition, and as words often lead me to music, I let this moving and repetitive jingle from the beautiful Debussy prelude Des pas sur la neige invade me. At that very moment, I was experimenting on the best way to produce harmonics with a piano by putting my fingers on the strings. By magic, those two events matched pretty well. The major and the minor seconds of this prelude could sound differently depending on the chosen harmonics. Experimentation met fatality. So I included this little Debussy piece, not as a quote, but as the possibility of the convergence of the personalities of these six musicians; the possibility of a whiteness in which footsteps, with the divergence of their paths, recall the meanderings of sound digressions.”

(Philippe Manoury)