« The work Love and Gratitude now exists in a previously unreleased version.

The original version of Love and Gratitude was crowned with a professional recording with the musicians of the Sofia orchestra in Bulgaria in 2024; in that same year a second version was born, sublimated by the voice of Kelly Aura, and in this year 2025 a new, unprecedented and unheard-of version is coming to life, inspired by my encounter with Christophe Clergue, the brilliant inventor of the ShinVav Audio loudspeakers, unique in the world. In our fascinating conversations, I was amazed to hear: “I can no longer listen to music in a tempered scale”.

Until then my music was in a tempered scale. As a musician wishing to record with orchestral musicians, I had mourned natural tuning, because classical instruments operate almost exclusively in equal temperament. And yet the importance of this question is so great that it was part of the very first revelations about the musical language that I received in 2008, which then initiated all the years of research carried out through the numbers, sounds, shapes and colours of this language.

As it was revealed to me, the natural temperament or equal temperament of the scale is far more than a question of different viewpoints on how to tune it, as if this were a consideration downstream of what a scale is. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: there is no genesis of the scale without this natural and true tuning, and this question therefore comes upstream of the scale itself; the whole genesis of the scale intrinsically depends on it. So it is not only a matter of saying that without this tuning we destroy the scale, but that without this tuning the scale simply would not exist at all. If we follow this point of view through to the end, we discover that any other tuning literally kills the scale.

So this is far more than a matter of tuning; it is a matter of life. It is a state in which the scale is therefore either alive or dead, and thus of living music or of dead music.

There is a ton of discourse about 432 Hz, whereas the question of the reference pitch is secondary. We can have living music at 440 Hz and dead music at 432 Hz.
This question is so secondary that everything circulating on this subject borders on the ridiculous compared with the importance of the choice of temperament, which seems totally ignored, showing once again how our world seems to be turning upside down.

I knew that one day my music would operate from this living scale that was revealed to me in 2008; meeting Christophe Clergue in 2025 was the turning point.

So I completely reworked this piece, parted ways with the musicians of the Sofia orchestra and instead implanted the living sounds of the orchestra tuned in a natural, living temperament.

I listened to the comparative result on ShinVav Audio loudspeakers by Christophe Clergue, and I experienced something I would never have believed possible: I preferred this new version created by my own means rather than the one recorded with the excellence of the Bulgarian musicians. I would never have thought I could prefer this version crafted by my own hands rather than by theirs.
And yet the inexplicable magic beyond words does not lie: there is a before and an after, death on one side, life on the other, with no possibility of going back.

Music is the breath of spirit; sound is its body, its chalice.
The spirit of my music has always been alive, but its body was dead. That has never prevented me from perceiving and receiving its beauty, but its impact right down into the cells of the body has until now been considerably limited by its dead sonic dimension.

And what can a dead sound transmit to living cells if not death?
“If you want to control the people, start by controlling their music.” Plato

Here is the very first fully living version of Love and Gratitude, which contains not only the breath of spirit but also the breath of life of this work, whose words were discovered by Dr Masaru Emoto as being, par excellence, those that are a source of life and that regenerate life in their original purity!

May this work breathe its life — the life of its spirit and of its living sonic body — into you and through you. »

Yves Ruhlmann