Ophélia is an hommage to composer Pierre Boulez and his work Dérive.
In french, “dérive” has many meanings, either shifting intentionally or unintentionally. This was my first impulse when I started reflecting on the work of Pierre Boulez. Similarly to him I find myself incapable of staying “still” in my creativity, always changing, always rewriting, finding new paths, unexplored path that lead me to the final destination, but is the destination ever truly final ? I think Pierre Boulez would say no, that we shall continue to move forward and I think I would say the same. 

While thinking about the dichotomy of the word “derive” the painting of Ophélia by Sir John Everett Millais came to my mind.

Ophélia, driven by madness lets herself drown and keeps continuously shifting in hope of a better resting place. Therefore I named my piece Ophélia. 

I dedicated several months of work for this composition, I stopped every other project I had to solely focus on this one and I have found myself transformed by the process of working on Ophélia. Not only did I find myself with many sketches but I rewrote a lot. The piece is truly sculpted from an initial idea around F# which I keep coming back to. Instruments are paired but they have different functions. For example violin 1 and 2 are leaders, and violin 3 and 4 provide the “dérive”, the “moving texture in the background.” This concept didn’t come to me easily but after I spent so much time with the details of the sound I was looking for I found that this approach was extremely interesting. 
This composition revealed to me a hidden beauty I find in my own work, and it is the detail. The attention to the details. For that I want to thank Mr. Boulez for his guidance!