The organ is, for the French composer Jean-Louis Florentz (1947-2004), the privileged instrument from which a musical universe among the most original of the post-Messian era was born. The four works he intends for this instrument punctuate his symphonic and choral output as benchmarks placed at the heart of a work whose musical density is matched only by semantic complexity. The art of Jean-Louis Florentz is a crucible where three worlds interpenetrate (the musical composition, the sciences of the nature and the marvelous) within a two-headed culture (Western and African) with a view to a single objective : Spirituality. The work is, at Jean-Louis Florentz, loaded to the maximum. Strong images, memories of powerful impressions and human experiences lived during his travels, welcome in a very personal style of extra-European music and sounds of animal origin, superimposed multiple meanings, complex symbolic structuring as well as a whole fantasy tinged with marvelous coming to enrich an already rich sensible experience are as tablets within the work, giving it a strongest consistency possible.
The first volume, The Florentzian Universe , explores the various aspects of a complex thought: the relation to the organ, the experience acquired during study tours, the interest in animal acoustics, the relationship to religious, the foundations of modal language. The signifying processes put together by the composer under the expression poetry of "wax and gold" are detailed and placed in their respective contexts. Finally, a journey of the entire work of Jean-Louis Florentz is brushed from organ production, revealing a portrait of one of the most endearing composers of the late twentieth century.
The second volume, A tetralogy for the organ , analyzes in depth each of the four major works that Jean-Louis Florentz intended for the pipe instrument ?: Laudes (1985), (1991), The Southern Cross (2000) and The Prelude of The Black Child (2002). Analyze musical and hermeneutique combine to reveal, beyond the extraordinary coherence of each work, a relationship between sound and meaning that Jean-Louis Florentz places at the heart of his work.