A "fredon", or hum, is that little inner music, mumbled for oneself but audible in silence, when no other surrounding music can be heard. It would only take a little, a slightly louder hum, for it to fill the room. A hum is something between a closed, meditative inner expression and a desire for expansion, for airing in the outside world. It is on the fringe, undefined, a little blurred. It wanders and digresses, taking known snatches of music as its starting point. It repeats, returns or changes direction brusquely. It has no clear aim. But it accompanies us, providing a rhythm to work in hand, giving it a little air. It provides a threshold between the rolling out of a thought and what takes shaped on a sheet of paper when one is drawing, for example.
A hum is neither the heroic silence of John Cage, nor a pop or high-tech excess. It has points in common with the "little motif" dear to Paul Klee, or Henri Michaux's "music in full rout", with glossolalia, with some compositions by Meredith Monk, and with the graffiti from the side of the motorway put to music by Harry Partch in Barstow...
How to give form to a hum? To this oscillation hesitating between inwardness and outwardness, between intimacy and envelopment, between restraint and expansion? How to show this incertitude of register in which references and digressions meet and pass ?