Le Gibet

Le Gibet is the second movement of the piano suite “Gaspard de la Nuit“ by Maurice Ravel, based on the homonymous poem by Aloysius Bertrand. It is one of the slowest, darkest pieces ever composed in the Western art music history, and according to Ravel, “Gaspard has been a devil in coming, but that is only logical since it was he who is the author of the poems. My ambition is to say with notes what a poet expresses with words“¹. This is an artistic creation, based on a multi-instrumental arrangement of the original piece, created and performed by Luís Bittencourt, and a film created and edited by film-maker Augusto Lado. Composed in E♭ minor, the observer is presented with a view of the desert, where the lone corpse of a hanged man on a gibbet stands out against the horizon, reddened by the setting sun. Meanwhile, a bell tolls from inside the walls of a far-off city, creating the deathly atmosphere that surrounds the observer. In the original piano work, there is