Le Bois qui chante
Jean-Claude Morin
2004 - 52 min - Beta numérique - Couleur - France

This documentary originates in my fascination for forest and music. And as the making of instruments requires specific wood, known as resonance wood, I went in search of a correspondence between that singing wood and the eminently sacred nature music. I met one of the few woodcutters who still harvest music wood in France, as well as a brilliant internationally successful organ builder, well-established stringed instruments makers and a harpsichord maker lost in the heart of wood, who all only swear by unusual, if not forgotten, instruments, which they resuscitate for use of virtuosos. And finally, a pruner-carver who caresses wood so well that he makes it sing and who invented the last music instrument called the "arbrasson" ("soundtree"). I composed a score, so to speak, for each of those characters, asking them to defend a demonstration going from the primitive forest to the lyric fights of several instruments, whose strange and magnificent tones resound deep down in us like the call of a lost world.