There is something of game-play in the style of Philippe Boesmans. The Belgian composer likes to create illusion, play the trouble-maker, toss out musical snares, even use a technical difficulty to create a new world, a novel idea. This implicit surpassing is often driven by the desire to multiply the instrumental resources available to him, as if his music was a game of eruption, a cure through abundance, a volatile will. This technique of surpassing is of course applied to his own instrument, the piano, but also to the relationship between soloist and ensemble, as will be the case in the multiplication effects of the viola and the 15 instruments of the ensemble accompanying it in Surfing. Four Tunes come from the Love and dance Tunes: a fleeting, ephemeral, introductory "round", more murmur than rondo; an escape route that would also be a door that opens. The second Tune takes on more aggressive hues (alla Prokofiev) through a transparency (very like Debussy), the third, before the return of the round is more ephemeral, more elliptical. The same atmosphere was to predominate in later Tunes: the latter were indeed also written in the continuity of Philippe Boesmans" work in his operas. Cadenza, that, by its formulation gives the illusion of improvisation, is a strictly notated score, something the first performer, Chantal Bohets, was so prettily to call an "effect of trompe-oreille". Fanfare I, one of the first scores in which the composer deliberately attacked his principle of multiplication of the instrument. A single pianist faces two pianos in this score "for two pianos and two hands"! From now on the multiplication game will hold no secrets for the composer. Surfing was first performed on 19 March 1990 at the Ars Musica festival by Christophe Desjardins, the dedicatee of the work along with Sylvain Cambreling and the ensemble Musique Nouvelle conducted by Georges-Élie Octors. The work is especially intended to be an image of movement.