This was originally only a piano piece without a name. After a while it somehow got called "Boule de neige" (snowball), it was starting to snow in January 2015. Then I thought it would be good to make a video with a snowball fight to go with it, but it didn't snow enough for that. I still decided to change the name to "Bataille de neige".
So I then searched the Internet Archive and found this amazing silent video from the US military archive, now in public domain: Snow On The Western Front. This shows a happy crowd of people with a mix of civilians and soldiers from different countries having a snowball fight in Paris during the winter of 1944-1945, a few months after it had been liberated, 70 years ago.
The original piano piece that I had written was longer and didn't follow what was going on in the video but it had the right kind of atmosphere. So after many, many attempts at gradually adjusting the piece to match the video, playing the piano while watching it, this is what I ended up with. The video sequence has not been altered from the original archive, only the music was made to follow it and is played in real time.
Needless to say, it was not really necessary to have a world war and for anyone to die before having a massive and joyful snowball fight. Maybe we should all do this every snowy winter in order not to forget...
This is also the first video content on verdigris.mu!
