MARSEILLE

I'm not quite sure that really happened. There are moments in life that, if forewarned of their imminent occurrence, would seem so impossibly unlikely as to invite incredulity. To have a ten-piece orchestra of professional classical musicians play six pieces of my music in front of a refined audience of three hundred or so at the venue Friche La Belle de Mai in Marseille is one of them.

Berlin-based outfit Zeitkratzer (led by Reinhold Friedl) and myself were invited by the venerable GMEM for Festival Les Musiques - an annual fortnight of mostly highbrow contemporary music and dance. Intertwined with my own pieces were four early works by Morton Feldman, and the juxtapositions were predictably dramatic, and for my perspective, worked surprisingly well. The musicians did an enormously impressive respectful job, and were a total pleasure to work with.

Anyway, other than to say that it was emotionally moving and humbling, the experience was so unusual that I could do with more time to reflect upon it. But it certainly helps in the schizophrenic personal struggle of a preposterous, intolerable superiority complex versus a sense of shameful fraudulence.