The musical idea behind the piece draws on the imaginary world of telluric forces: those capable of making the ground shake, of cracking, shifting, and transforming it. Both unsettling and fascinating, these forces call our certainties and foundations into question, reminding us that nothing is immutable. Like the ground during an earthquake, the music rumbles, and musical waves become seismic waves.

The ensemble, made up in part of low-register instruments capable of releasing great energy, was chosen to explore dark, trembling sonorities. In particular, the use of interference-producing multiphonics on the baritone saxophone, and of scordatura on the double bass to produce double sounds in the extreme low register, allows the music to develop a sound material shaken by vast vibrations.

The form consists of an alternation between fortissimo moments, in which the musical material is set into vibration, and moments where the propagation of this vibration animates a second material, initially diaphanous and pianissimo. With each return of the fortissimo sections, the propagation of movement grows in scale, culminating in a solo piano section. The prepared instrument diffracts this accumulated energy into fragmented gestures, like remnants of sound debris after the musical material has cracked and been destroyed under the effect of this sonic upheaval.

The imaginary world of earthquakes and geological forces is also a political metaphor. In an abstract art such as contemporary music, without narrative or representation, the connection to the world may seem distant; yet a sharing of the sensible with the political remains possible. And perhaps it is precisely through form, more than through content, that art opens up worlds. The title of the piece, Premières secousses, echoes that of the book by Les Soulèvements de la Terre, in which the collective offers an overview of its actions in defence of the environment. The ideological foundations of our societies, under the grip of a capitalist ideology destructive of social bonds and ecosystems, may, through a fault line, begin to tremble under the effect of forces joining together in local struggles: first tremors as the starting point for the propagation of ideas and initiatives towards a radical transformation of our relationship with the world.