This work is inspired by Véronique Côté’s essay *La vie habitable*, in which she writes: “We move through the world, disoriented and uncertain, searching everywhere outside ourselves for a clue, a trace of the path to take. I am sure, I am certain, that learning to listen once again to what stirs within us, fragile yet shimmering, sensitive yet irreducible, is the best way to find our lost North again, filled with space, silence, and time.”

I listened closely, and what I heard were familiar harmonies and melodies. *Ce qui frémit* seeks to convey their brilliance, freshness, and depth through the use of just intonation. They do me good: I had forgotten their taste, their colour. I am rediscovering them, vibrating beneath my fingers and in my ears. *Ce qui frémit* is an invitation to reconnect with that vulnerable and luminous part of ourselves that modernity so often tends to stifle.

The work is built around a just intonation system specifically designed for this project. The strings and frets of the viola da gamba are retuned, as is the synthesizer. This approach brings out rich resonances between frequencies, giving consonance a new meaning and stability. These enticing intervals invite us to listen and lend a sense of fullness to the diatonic material, rewarding deep listening. The form itself is partly open: I provided the materials, structure, and main instructions, while certain parameters—durations, articulations, dynamics, timbres, transitions, and solos—were developed in collaboration with performers Marie-Loup Cottinet and Daniel Añez. In this process, the score and oral tradition become complementary tools, allowing for both formal construction and expressive freedom.

*Ce qui frémit* runs counter to a society that constantly values speed, efficiency, productivity, and control. Equal temperament, which has become dominant in modern Western musical practice, serves for me as a fruitful metaphor for this logic: a practical and efficient system that standardizes the relationships between pitches at the expense of some of their acoustic richness. Just intonation, by contrast, asks us to slow down, listen, and pay attention to the subtle differences between sounds. Similarly, the use of improvisation and less prescriptive notation restores space for the performers’ individuality and challenges the customary hierarchy between composer and musician.

My aim, then, is not to create a work that represents the anxiety of our time, but to concretely create a different space: a space where we can slow down, listen, feel, and rediscover a more direct relationship with matter, with others, and with ourselves. This resistance takes shape here through sound itself, through the deliberate simplicity of the melodies, through the freedom granted to the performers, and through the refusal to treat music as an object to be demonstrated rather than an experience to be lived.

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