note

The American author Edmund White describes the flâneur as ‘a stroller, a loiterer, someone who ambles through a city without apparent purpose but is secretly attuned to the history of the place and in covert search of adventure, aesthetic or erotic.’ White’s book ‘The Flâneur’, subtitled ‘A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris’, is a collection of wanderings through the city, its history and the thoughts of the some of the people that have helped define what it is — touching on, amongst many other things, the buildings of the Île St Louis, the controversial and colourful life of writer Colette, the history (and current status) of French royalists, the habit of gay Parisian writers not to admit they’re gay writers, and so on.

Flâneur is, similarly, a wandering through a musical city populated by figures like Debussy, Ravel, Messaien, Stravinsky, Takemitsu and Edith Piaf — along the way, connections between the works of those musicians and my own are made through quotation, transformation and allusion. I set out to compose Flâneur with no preordained ideas about its form, and instead allowed myself to see where those connections might lead – to stroll through a series of French-hued sketches.