Human beings have been composing for centuries, and still we keep pushing our own limits, renewing ourselves, blending genres and sounds that were never supposed to meet. That infinity of options makes composition both beautiful and dizzying.
Because creating is choosing. In an ocean of possibilities, with no landmarks, you drown. What people call the blank page is actually a page that’s already too full. It contains everything that could exist, and that is exactly what paralyzes us. It isn’t a lack of ideas that stops creation, it’s their excess.
So when I begin a new creative journey, the first question I ask myself is: what colors am I going to paint with?
Think of a composer as a painter. The canvas is time. The colors are sound. And like a painter who chooses a palette before touching the canvas, I choose my instruments, my textures, my limits. That first choice will give the album its signature. The melodies come after, once the frame is set.
The most visible colors in music are the instruments. Piano alone. Orchestra. Voices. And the voice, I admire it so much. The way it can be worked, sculpted, pushed. And the role of chance, too. The voice is the only instrument you don’t choose. You are born with it. You don’t decide its range, or its grain. And yet you can spend a whole lifetime shaping it, revealing what it carried in silence from the beginning.
Every choice of instruments opens one world and closes ten others. That is the principle of creation. Renouncing the most possible, so only what is truly necessary remains.
And then there are the hidden choices. The ones the audience doesn’t hear consciously, but still feels. The chord progressions, the accompaniment patterns, the length of themes, the way you vary them. It’s there, inside those secret decisions, that a musical identity is built.
I believe deeply in this discipline of choice. I believed in it enough to impose, for three albums, a single color: the piano. Nothing else. By conviction. The piano alone taught me how to grow inside a constraint, how to go deep without scattering. It gave me immense possibilities, and real limits at the same time. And it is that tension between the two that forged my signature.
But everything in my life has changed. Before, I could only paint with the colors that were accessible to me. Today, they are all available. A full orchestra, a choir… what existed yesterday only as a dream is now within reach. It’s magnificent. I fought with the hope of one day standing in that position, with new means of expression. And it’s dizzying. When everything becomes possible, the risk of getting lost is immense. In music as in life. Total freedom is the enemy of clarity. You have to concentrate even harder not to disperse. Many have been lost because they had access to everything.
That was the main challenge of my new album, using new colors to give my message a different scale. After two years of searching, I did it, and I’m proud.
This album has a different touch from the first three. But when you hear it, I think you’ll recognize me. The palette has changed, but the hand that paints stayed the same.
Sincerely,
Sofiane Pamart
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I am really a big fan of these newsletters! Your articulate explanations of the process, is not only informative, but also highly inspiring and has way authentic feel to it!