l’air sans notes is based upon an excerpt taken from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novel Journey to the End of the Night:
Personne ne lui résiste au fond à la musique. On n’a rien à faire avec son cœur, on le donne volontiers. Faut entendre au fond de toutes les musiques l’air sans notes, fait pour nous, l’air de la mort.
Nobody can really resist music. You don’t know what to do with your heart, you’re glad to give it away. At the bottom of all music you have to hear the tune without notes, made just for us, the tune of Death. (Translation by Ralph Manheim)
Musical ciphers and harmonies associated with specific words and letters from this excerpt play a large role in the language and form of l’air sans notes, so textual incipits are included throughout the score to indicate which phrases are being activated in a given section. The meditative first movement, l’air sans notes, presents the harmonic cipher in the ordering of the original text. The fierce second movement, l’air de la Mort, reorders the harmonic cipher and introduces the use of the string players’ untrained voices to express the dramatic narrative of the last sentence of the excerpt. It should be noted that this work in no way reflects Céline’s political views, but rather seeks to interpret these lines of prose in a new and meaningful way.