The following text was written for a lecture presented at IRCAM as part of the seminar “Pourquoi écrire la musique?” — Écrire le geste. The lecture was given in Paris on 2 April 2026.
I have always had a slightly problematic relationship with the word gesture. Not because I don’t understand what it means, but because it seems to imply something that, for me, does not quite correspond to how I experience things.
A gesture suggests a movement that begins somewhere and goes somewhere else. It suggests intention, direction, clarity. Something that can be followed. Something that belongs to a body and is projected outward.
And in music, we often think of gesture in this way: as the action that produces sound, or as the shape that sound takes, as a trace of that action. And yet, I am not sure that this is where sound really exists — or at least not where it stays. For me, there is always a small gap between things, between thought and action, between action and sound. And this gap is not neutral. It is something I am very aware of, also in the way I navigate the world.
I have had OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) for as long as I can remember. And I think it is important to say it here, not as something anecdotal, but because it shapes very concretely how I experience gesture. In fact, I think I compose the music I compose precisely because of it.
When I say that I have OCD, I don’t mean it in a general or metaphorical sense, but in a very concrete way. It is not simply about being precise or organized. It is a condition in which thoughts can become repetitive and intrusive, and create a kind of internal pressure that seeks resolution. This pressure often translates into actions that have to be carried out in a very specific way in order to release the tension. What is important for me here is that these actions, these gestures, do not originate from a free decision. They are consequences. They follow a necessity that precedes them. And I think this has deeply influenced how I relate to gesture in music, because I tend to perceive it less as an origin, and more as something that emerges from an internal constraint.
In my experience, a gesture is very often not the origin of something, but its consequence. It follows a thought, or sometimes a chain of thoughts, that imposes itself — a repetition, a necessity, something that has to be executed. Not because it expresses something, but because it resolves a tension. So the gesture is precise, often extremely precise, but it is not free. It is not open. It is already determined by something that precedes it. And because of this, I think I have always had a certain distrust of gesture as something expressive or primary. It feels too close to something automatic, something that follows rather than initiates.
At the same time, because of my OCD, I also have a very strong need for things to be controlled, to be exact, to be what I feel is right. And this creates a contradiction. Because although I am drawn to precision and perfection, what I am actually looking for in music, and perhaps in art more generally, is almost the opposite. Not chaos, but something that escapes, something that cannot be completely fixed, something that resists my control.
There are moments, when I am writing, where sound begins to resist in a very particular way. I start with a material, a texture, a way of playing, and I try to guide it, to shape it, to give it a direction. And then, slowly, something shifts. The sound begins to lean somewhere else. It starts to suggest a continuation that I didn’t intend, almost as if it already knows where it wants to go.
I remember speaking about this once with a composer friend, trying to describe this particular kind of frustration — the feeling that the sounds I was writing were, in a certain sense, almost deciding something on their own, as if they were oriented toward becoming something that I myself had not intended, or perhaps even something I was actively resisting. And this creates a very strange situation, because you find yourself there, trying to control every detail, every parameter, and at the same time having the persistent sensation that what you are working with is not entirely passive, that it has its own tendencies, its own internal logic, almost its own behavior. At some point, during a dinner, this friend said something that stayed with me, which is that perhaps we should think of sounds — and even of pieces — almost like our children: in the sense that we bring them into existence, we shape them, we take care of their development, but that once they enter the concrete world, they begin to acquire a certain autonomy, a form of agency that is no longer entirely under our control. And that, in a way, our role is not to force them into a direction that corresponds to what we initially wanted, but rather to understand the potential that is already present within them, and to guide it without constraining it too rigidly, because doing so might actually weaken what is most specific or most alive in them — even if that potential leads somewhere we did not expect, or perhaps did not consciously desire.
I don’t have children — I do have a dog (Pan), but I have spent so much time training him that he is, in many ways, almost perfect — and so my point of reference is perhaps limited. But despite that, I feel that I understand what my friend meant, or at least that I recognize something very familiar in that idea, especially in the way sound, once it begins to exist, seems to demand a different kind of listening, one that is less about imposing and more about following.
In this sense, I feel both close to and distant from the way Helmut Lachenmann1 thinks about sound. In his work, gesture becomes something very concrete. Sound is the result of an action, of a resistance, of a physical encounter between the body and the instrument. One hears the pressure, the friction, the effort. Gesture reveals the conditions of sound production. And this has been extremely important, because it brings sound back to something real, something physical, something that cannot be reduced to abstraction. But at the same time, even there, gesture remains an origin. It is still the cause. The sound carries the trace of that action. And I think this is where I begin to move away. Because for me, what matters is not only how sound is produced, but what happens after — how it continues, how it transforms, how it escapes the gesture that produced it.
It is also important for me to clarify how I imagine sound before it even reaches the instrument. Because I don’t really experience sound as something that begins with the instrument. If I start from the instrument, I immediately limit what I can imagine. The instrument carries too many constraints — idiomatic, technical, and personal. So when I compose, I try not to think about instruments at all. I try to imagine a sound first, a very precise sonic image, something that already exists in my mind as a complex entity, almost like a body, or an organism. And only afterwards do I ask how this can be realized. At that point, the instrument appears, but it is no longer the source: it is a tool. And also a limitation, because what I imagine is always more complex than what can be realized. So every sound that we write is already a reduction, a compromise. And yet, paradoxically, it is exactly through this compromise that sound becomes alive.
Once it is brought into the physical world, it begins to behave. It resists, it deviates, it transforms, it accumulates small differences that cannot be fully controlled. And in these moments, I have the feeling that sound acquires a kind of agency. It begins to guide the process. It suggests its own temporality, its own duration, its own internal necessity. It tells us, in a way, how it wants to continue, or when it has reached its limit. So temporality is not something I impose. It emerges from the sound itself. And form, for me, is not something fixed in advance: it is the space around the sound, something that is continuously reshaped by it. In that sense, it always surprises me when composers begin with a predefined form, often inherited from historical models, as if temporality could be imposed without affecting the sound itself. For me, it is always the sound that transforms the form, not the other way around.2
So if gesture is not, for me, the origin of sound, then the question becomes: what replaces it? What kind of structure allows sound to exist and evolve without relying on gesture as its primary force?
This also influences the way I think about structure. I do not really think in terms of gestures, which feel too short, too local, something that appears and disappears. Even when it is complex, it still operates on a very small scale. What I am interested in is something that sustains a much longer temporality, something that can exist over time as a whole. So instead of writing gestures, I try to build something. Not in the sense of constructing an object, but in the sense of creating a body — a complex organism with layers. An external layer that we perceive almost as a surface, and internal layers where things are constantly moving, shifting, interacting.
Sometimes I think of it almost like an arm. Not as an image, but as a structure. An arm is not a gesture. It contains the possibility of many gestures, but it is something else. It has muscles, joints, weight, resistance, flexibility. It can behave in many different ways depending on very small changes. This feels closer to how I imagine sound.
So what I try to compose is not the gesture itself, but the environment in which something can happen. A field, a space, a structure that allows sound to appear, to transform, to disappear. From the outside, these structures often move very slowly, almost as one body, different layers evolving together. It is not always clear whether a gesture is actually taking place, or whether what we perceive is something more global, a kind of overall movement. And even when gesture becomes unclear, something still remains at the level of the sound. There is still a way in which it begins, evolves, disappears — a way in which it is shaped from within. What I write is often closer to this. Not gestures, in the sense of movements from one point to another, but articulations — small configurations of energy, pressure, density, that define how a sound exists in a given moment. These articulations do not necessarily produce a gesture. They can accumulate, dissolve, interfere with one another. Sometimes what they create is not a direction, but a space. So perhaps gesture does not disappear, but it is no longer the origin. It becomes something that emerges, something that appears and disappears within a larger field.
At the same time, there is something else that is very important for me, and that is directly connected to this tension between control and non-control. Because of my OCD, I have a very strong need to control things, to define them as precisely as possible, to bring them to a point where they correspond exactly to what I imagine. And in music, this has led me to spend a great deal of time developing techniques and sounds that allow me to work at an extremely fine level of detail — specifying, for example, the exact position of the bow, the precise pressure of the hand, and many other micro-parameters.
In that sense, my scores are often extremely detailed and precise. And this precision gives me a certain stability, because it allows me to feel that everything is, in principle, under my control.
But at the same time, as I said before, what I am actually drawn to is not this control itself, but the possibility of its failure. What interests me is not perfection, but the emergence of something that escapes it — something unstable, something that cannot be entirely fixed. So I deliberately work with techniques that are fragile, that are inherently unstable, that resist exact reproduction. Techniques that, even when performed exactly as written, never produce the same result twice. In this way, there is always a gap between what is written and what is heard.
I often feel that what I compose is a kind of color — something whose general quality I know very precisely. And yet, I never know exactly which shade will appear in the end, because this depends on the performer, on the instrument, on the context, on many small variations that cannot be fully controlled. And it is precisely this instability that interests me. Because it allows the sound to remain alive, to resist being reduced to a single, fixed shape.
And I think this is also where the gap I mentioned earlier becomes most visible. Because this difference between what is written and what is heard is not simply something to be corrected or reduced. It is the space in which the sound actually exists. It is where control reaches its limit, and where something else begins to emerge, something that cannot be entirely predicted or fixed in advance. What remains is a field of tensions: between thought and action, between control and loss of control, between what is imagined and what can be realized, between what is written and what cannot be fully fixed, and perhaps also between what we intend to hear and what sound ultimately becomes.
NOTES:
1 I refer to Lachenmann here in part because the lecture following mine focused specifically on gesture in his music.
2 although the question of shaping temporality is far more complex than this, and remains something I am still trying to fully understand; I have written about it here in more detail.