Electroacoustic music on support, acousmatic

Acousmatique

*2007 *

Duration 12′

création le 2 avril 2008 au Festival Syntax 7.2 à Perpignan

A bollard is a vertical sliding system to which boats tie up in locks; it emits discontinuous random sounds during the whole time the water is falling in the lock, and there are about a dozen that “sing” in this way in this gigantic sonorous cathedral. This is the sound film of a passage through a lock on the River Rhône. The water can sustain an entire life and intense human activity full of strange sounds for “terrestrials”; navigating in rivers where the sound environment is all fluidity can also create shocks, more or less violent, since the water is in movement, sometimes percussive and very harsh. This, therefore, is water heard from a boat passing through one of the immense locks on the Rhône, where everything is amplified and takes on a grandiose fullness.

Soundcloud – YouTube – BANDCAMP

*2006*

Multi channel – 8 tracks

Duration 16′

Soundcloud – YouTube – BANDCAMP

This title, borrowed from Erich Auerbach, German writer and critic deceased in 1957, immediately sets the scene on a plane where realism is depicted in the aesthetics of Western music.

Electro-acoustic music has the ability, using “concrete” sounds (with all the ambiguity implied by the word), of giving us an immediate sensation of reality, which we can all situate in relation to our references and private objects of reference; these are the profound notions of sublimitas and humilitas, which merge and unite in musical expression.

I have chosen a composition on eight channels, and sound recordings on the edge of a motorway, with an especially dynamic and very bold Doppler sound effect, which immediately informs and imposes movement in the finite space of octophonic music.

Every listener will be able to decipher his or her own images of a collective mental universe from the essence of this kind of artistic creation, just like the scar by which Ulysses was recognised by his former servant woman.

for Tape alone

*2004*

Duration 16 min 40

State commission
created in the auditorium Olivier Messiaen – Maison de Radio France – Paris 14 mars 2004

For Aurélie

Even now, we still encounter the problematics of Platon and particularly of Aristote, suggested nearly 2500 years ago, concerning the nature of art and the role of the creator in the City.
According to Aristote, artistic creation (poèsis) is not simply rhetoric (diègèsis), but “imitation” (mimèsis), providing the possibility of purification (catharsis).
Mimesis must be understood to be not simply a copy of reality but a sort of renewal of this “energeia” which is the essence of life.

Since the 19th Century, first photographs, then cinema and the media – so omnipresent in the 20th Century, which have filled us with images and all kinds of representations – have tended to illegitimate the mimetic pretensions of painting, and even of music. The 20th Century witnessed the emergence of painters who refuse any relationship between their work and reality, along the various currents of abstraction, in addition to a stubborn resurgence of the cry “art for art’s sake”.

This was the reflection and its confrontation with the music of the 21st Century which gave me my departure point. Indeed, this work uses both sounds of “imitation” drawing their aesthetic value from the “world reality” and sounds of “images of creation” which re-create the energy and meaningful acts of life.

But let us go back to Aristote’s opposition of mimèsis and diègèsis, seized upon by Anglo-Saxon criticism, which distinguishes between the ideas of showing and telling : my work is also a discourse which evolves like an expedition and sometimes like an odyssey, in the history of the memory, drawn from narrations, interactions, relations, comparisons, imitations, exemplifications, from renewed meaning, from life.

Denying myself any equivocation between these two notions, I resolutely gave preference to “rendering the perceived impression in a new combination” (Paul Klee).

In its fundamental and atavistic ambiguity, where image and reality exist together, where meaning and abstract mingle ; to me, acousmatic music was the obvious choice of a language fitting my approach to these difficult themes.

Acousmatic music  18′ (short version 12′) – 2002

The word orphism was suggested by the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, with the publication of his “Méditations esthétiques” (Aesthetic meditations) en 1912, to describe some aspects of avant-garde painting. Apollinaire names five orphic painters: Picasso, Delaunay, Léger, Picabia, Duchamp.
So, this piece is a re-read (and a rewrite) of a piece composed in 1983 to pay homage to the painter Fernand Léger: Eléments mécaniques (Mechanical elements).
The piece seemed to me to be strongly marked by the very “analogical” techniques of the time, and so I have tried, using digital methods and a more focused discourse, to expose in a new fashion this concept of the mechanical element in the world of sound just as Fernand Léger achieved it in the world of painting.

Fold-in

8’10

Acousmatic piece

dedicated to Ying-Chien Wang, highly talented ehru performer

Commissioned by Taiwan Music Institute and TPMC for International Taiwan Music Festival 2017

Fold-in is an acousmatic piece whose sounds come entirely from this instrument, very popular in Asia: the erhu, sometimes called the Chinese violin.

During the sound recordings, some characters of the instrument immediately asserted themselves: a very active tone, huge energy, a very marked timbre, a very long and intense sustain of the bow, a wide register of dynamics and highly varied play modes.

The reverse side of these strong characters is that here we have a highly identifiable instrument, sometimes connoted, whose genes are perceptible in all the manipulations.

The fold-in refers to techniques used in literature, with permutations, by William S. Burroughs and Brian Gysin in the years 1950 to 1960, whose work The Third Mind combines these different experiences.

These techniques naturally bring to mind the techniques for editing concrete music in its beginnings, then for editing electroacoustic music with the development of a true language arising from these elementary manipulations; the different experiences with collective works and exquisite cadavers practised in the nineteen sixties by French experimental studios will also be remembered (GRM, GMEB).

I have therefore retained these strong characters of the erhu (tone, sostenuto, timbre, pizzicato etc.), keeping the morphologies, the “allure” and other Schaefferian criteria, in order then to construct the discourse in a relatively simplicity of editing and mixing, including processes similar to fold-in.

Thank you to Ying-Chien, for these precious sounds.

BANDCAMP

A Nicole

Pour bande seule

* 1985 *

Durée 14’00

commande Ina-GRM

création le 28 avril 1986 au Grand auditorium de Radio France à Paris

 A l’origine de cette pièce, une préoccupation sur l’aspect sémantique de la musique, et particulièrement de la musique acousmatique . De vive voix… lettre morte… deux expressions proches du vocabulaire linguistique; mais aussi deux métaphores omniprésentes dans la musique, qui lui donnent sa fonction de communication par une information explicite, implicite, émotionnelle, en un mot : esthétique.

La musique sur bande comporte cette terrible exigence de devoir inscrire définitivement “dans le texte” l’émotion, l’expression, la vive voix.

C’est cette espèce de message “stylistique” qui revient à l’interprète dans la musique vocale ou instrumentale. La musique sur bande me parait être, par nature, le terrain privilégié pour exploiter cette ambiguïté entre l’information sémantique et l’information esthétique.

La pièce est construite autour de trois types de matériaux sonores :
– sons concrets bruts
– sons concrets transformés en studio analogique et numérique (123)
– synthèse proche des sons concrets réalisée sur micro-ordinateur

Ces trois matériaux m’ont permis d’installer un va-et-vient entre “la réalité” des sons concrets et les développements métaphoriques des “pseudo réalités” des sons transformés ou synthétisés.
Le sens intrinsèque du son concret est toujours dévié et élargi grâce aux transformations; il s’enrichit ainsi de toute une palette de sens extrinsèques qui lui donne, de cette manière, sa fonction de communication esthétique.
La personnalisation du message s’opère entièrement au cours de la réalisation de la bande, en établissant un réseau de relations analogiques, métaphoriques, affectives, qui place le récepteur (l’auditeur) dans sa propre “zone de réel” qui n’est ni absolue, ni réductrice, ni abstraite.

Acousmatic music

*2006*

Duration 6′

A sound film of a passage through N° 14 Lock on the river Rhône.
Water can also support a whole life and intense human activity full of noises, diverse and alien to “landlubbers”; navigating on rivers, where the sound environment is all fluidity, can also create shocks, more or less violent, because water moves; it is percussive, and sometimes very hard.

N° 14 Lock is water, heard from a boat passing one of the enormous locks on the river Rhône, where everything is highly amplified and takes on gigantic proportions.