I am very happy to share that La réponse est dans la pelote de laine has been selected for performance at the New Music on the Bayou Festival, which will take place from the 3rd to the 6th of June 2026 in Ruston and Monroe, in Louisiana.1
This invitation is particularly meaningful for me, especially because it opens a connection with a musical environment that is geographically and culturally distant from my everyday world. Encounters of this kind, however brief, often have a way of reshaping one’s sense of scale and perspective.
There is something quietly disorienting about imagining one’s music travelling far, detached from the conditions in which it was written, and yet continuing to exist as a set of instructions, gestures, and decisions that will be re-activated elsewhere. This distance today is also temporal: the piece leaves its point of origin and enters a different kind of present, shaped by other hands, other acoustics, and other forms of attention.
This year marks the festival’s tenth summer edition. Over the years, it has established itself as a place where composers and performers can meet in a relatively concentrated and practical setting, with a strong emphasis on bringing new pieces to life through direct collaboration.
Over the past few years, La réponse est dans la pelote de laine has had the chance to appear in a number of different contexts, revealing each time something slightly different of itself (a few traces of this path can be found here, here, here, and here). This upcoming performance feels, in that sense, less like an isolated event than another step in a trajectory that the piece seems to be tracing on its own, almost independently of me.
The New Music on the Bayou Festival offers precisely the right kind of setting for this trajectory to continue to unfold: a space where works are not simply presented, but re-encountered, re-articulated, and tested against new conditions.
If a piece can be said to “persist”, it is perhaps in this way: by continuing to generate situations in which it must be re-thought in sound.
I am grateful for this invitation, and look forward to hearing what will emerge when the piece reaches this new landscape. I hope you will enjoy it too!
4/6/2026, Update: The video is out! Many thanks to Professor Scot Humes for this wonderful performance!
Notes
- The festival’s programme can be found at the original link or, alternatively, here. ↩︎