Ô roi de Prusse

Ô roi de Prusse was composed during the summer of 1996. This piece is part of a triptych that includes Débordement and Machina F1.

These pieces were written as part of a musical project to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the death of Serge Garant.

In this piece, I used the famous theme that Frederic II, King of Prussia, gave to Johann Sebastian Bach to improvise, and which Bach later used as thematic material in his famous work, The offering musical. Two hundred years later, Serge Garant, intrigued by this famous theme, wrote a set of four works that he called Offrande I, II, III and IV.

I was also intrigued by the idea of incorporating Frederic II’s theme - with includes 11 tones of the chromatic scale

(excluding B flat) - along with fragments from Serge Garant’s Offrandes, in order to pay homage to Garant with my

own work, Ô roi de Prusse.