ABSTRACT
Signes, for instrumental ensemble, was declared by Maurice Ohana to be the first of his works to contain all the main features of his mature compositional language. It is also the first of a series of works composed over a period of eleven years, described as the Sigma Series, which bear witness to the growth and proliferation of his mature language into a range of other genres. The unusual instrumentation of Signes enabled Ohana to consolidate his distinctive approach to timbrai interplay, first explored in Tombeau de Claude Debussy. The nature-symbolism generating each movement of Signes recalls the pictorial impressionism of traditional Chinese and Japanese music. The incantatory monodies characteristic of Signes are revealing of Ohana’s approach to melody as a whole. Many sections of Signes make use of similar note-for-note parallelism to thicken-out chant-like monodies and create harmonic density.
