For symphony orchestra, choir and soloists
Composed and conducted by Yves Ruhlmann with the Sofia Session Orchestra & Choir
Professional recording of the premiere — Sofia, 2024
The work
Love and Gratitude
Trance Symphonic Music work
Duration: approximately 45 minutes
Composed in 2024
Instrumentation
Symphony orchestra
Choir
Soloists
The composer is glad to adapt the work to the instrumentations and specifications of the partners who host it.
Composed in 2024 and conducted by Yves Ruhlmann with the Sofia Session Orchestra & Choir, Love and Gratitude is a forty-five-minute work for symphony orchestra, choir and soloists. It was presented in Japan at the World Water Festival 2024, before more than ten thousand spectators outdoors and one hundred thousand participants online.
The work belongs to the symphonic tradition while developing a language of its own, which the composer has named Trance Symphonic Music. Like a cathedral in which every stone stands in symmetrical relation to the whole edifice, every note of Love and Gratitude stands in symmetrical relation to the entire system. At the heart of the work, a polyphonic mantra is repeated from beginning to end — not as a stagnant loop, but carried by a variation that unfolds in parallel, without ceasing. Repetition condenses energy. Variation amplifies it. From this simultaneous tension emerge nine successive steps that structure the work, each marking a threshold in condensation and amplification.
The climax of the work is not within the work. It is in the silence that follows it. All the energy condensed and amplified by the conjunction of repetition and variation is released at the moment when the music stops. The music has then acted as a springboard, as a passage — and it is in the final silence that it opens toward what lies beyond it.
Yves Ruhlmann is a Franco-Swiss composer. His artistic path is rooted in the classical symphonic tradition, yet moves beyond it through a clear intention: to make music an art in service of Beauty, transcendence and consciousness.
He trained in some of the most prestigious institutions of European academic art music — the Accademia Chigiana in Siena, where he worked under the direction of Luis Bacalov, the Conservatorio Licinio Refice in Frosinone, and the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Lyon. He stayed at the Académie de France à Rome – Villa Médicis, where he received a distinction for his merits.
His true path began after these studies. At the end of this training, he was able to measure what the institutions had left untouched: the knowledge of the meaning of musical language as a living language, which is almost never transmitted there and which only a few composers touch, as if by grace, without being taught. It was in the continuation of these studies, and beyond them, that he pursued for more than twenty years a work of research and discovery on musical language as a living language bearing meaning — where numbers, sounds, forms and colors carry their own significance.
From this work gradually emerged the compositional foundations that characterize his œuvre today: Musique Code Cantique, Trance Symphonic Music, and The Living Scale. His first Trance Symphonic Music work, Peace and Love, was composed in 2022. Love and Gratitude, in 2024, is the first work that the composer created and conducted himself with a symphony orchestra. Yves Ruhlmann founded the Symphoniya universe in 2023 to give this œuvre the coherent space it called for.
Trance Symphonic Music is nourishment in service of consciousness. Its vision is simple: that Beauty be both the means and the end. Music is its support; transcendence is the keystone that opens from the limited to the unlimited, within us as beyond us.
As a genre, Trance Symphonic Music belongs to the classical symphonic tradition. As an intention, it moves beyond it: it is not an art that is its own end, but an art that opens. Each Trance Symphonic Music work is a true sound cathedral — an implacable mathematical architecture in which number is no longer abstraction but music, a symphony of numbers singing the living.
The Trance Symphonic Music form is the precise architecture according to which each work is composed. Numerical translation does not operate only note by note — it operates across the entire architecture of relationships between notes. It is this double dimension that makes each work a sound cathedral in the full sense of the term.
At the heart of each work is a polyphonic mantra — born from translation according to the Musique Code Cantique method — which repeats from beginning to end. This repetition is neither stagnant nor mechanical: it is carried by a variation that unfolds in parallel, without ceasing. Here lies one of the singularities of Trance Symphonic Music: while much of Western music chooses between pure repetition and development, Trance Symphonic Music makes both coexist. Repetition condenses energy. Variation amplifies it. From this simultaneous tension emerge the nine successive steps that structure the work, each marking a threshold.
The method
A translation method that makes audible the song of the word. Beyond the word, which comes up against its own limits when it attempts to speak the unlimited, there exists an impalpable founding energy. Musique Code Cantique acts as a bridge: it receives this energy through numbers — the first language, the music of the universe — then translates it into audible music through mastery of musical language as a living language.
The polyphonic mantra at the heart of Love and Gratitude comes from this method.
The tuning
A musical scale founded on Pythagorean tuning — the tuning without which the scale has no genesis. Where the equal temperament governing modern Western music kills the scale by adjusting it, natural tuning lets it be born. More than a technical choice: the condition of living music.
Implemented in Symphoniya’s compositional work since 2025, following the encounter with ShinVav Audio speakers.
Trance Symphonic Music Concerto — Open World Premiere
Yves Ruhlmann is currently composing Mater Lucis, a Trance Symphonic Music concerto for symphony orchestra with an optional small choral part. The work is conceived as a great Marian homage — its original title was Ave Maria — rooted in the tradition of Latin canticle and adaptable to the liturgical or paraliturgical requirements of a festival.
The completion of the composition is planned for September 2026. The world premiere is open to interested orchestras and festivals.
Symphoniya is a universe dedicated to Music and Consciousness, founded by composer Yves Ruhlmann in 2023 and established in the Vallée de Joux, Switzerland. The universe hosts the works, classes and concerts through which Trance Symphonic Music, Musique Code Cantique and The Living Scale take form and meet their audience.
Where part of the Western tradition has carried the idea of an art that would be its own end, Symphoniya places Music within a function: to open, to elevate, to give access. To Beauty, to transcendence, to consciousness. Music serves, without ceasing to be Music in the full sense of the term.
To begin a dialogue
Yves Ruhlmann can be contacted directly for any programming proposal, request for further information — score, audio recording, estimate adapted to your instrumentation — or conversation about an upcoming premiere.
Recommended sound diffusion by ShinVav Audio speakers
The Symphoniya Universe — Vallée de Joux, Switzerland
