Beyrouth15072006 is a musical hommage to Lebanese trumpet player Mazen Kerbaj. During the Israel-Lebanon war in 2006, Mazen recorded himself improvising on the backdrop of Israeli bombings on his city. The discovery of this recording was a significant moment, both artistically and politically. At the time, I was a student at IRCAM in Paris where I had the opportunity to experiment in different directions with electronics in order to create meaningful connections with Mazen’s performance. One of the steps of this process was the development of a virtual instrument mirroring the model of the bomb which was used on Beyrouth. By the end of the composition process, I found myself employing the rather classical solution of the musical quotation.
Beyrouth was born as a solo work for trombone and electronics and subsequently developed to include an accompanying ensemble, both performed in Paris in 2012. In 2017, Ensemble NEC in Neuchâtel (Switzerland) commissioned a second movement to be performed in a concert featuring dedicatee Mazen Kerbaj as an improviser and performer.
BEYROUTH15072006 was premiered by Marc Abry at IRCAM in Paris in 2012. The version for trombone and ensemble was also performed by Alon Stoler at the Geneva Conservatoire.
A second movement was commissioned and premiered by Rosario Rizzo and the Nouvel Ensemble Contemporain (Neuchâtel, Switzerland) in 2017 and subsequently performed by Charles MacInnes and the Argonaut Ensemble, conducted by Elena Schwarz, as part of BIFEM festival in Bendigo (Australia) in 2017.