Chose promise… Voici donc la deuxième partie de ce fabuleux mélodrame de Francis Dhomont Cette fois c’est par la porte des contes de fées, de Grimm notamment, que l’imagination créatrice de Dhomont vient nous déranger et nous enrichir.

Il s’agit de la troisième version que le compositeur livre de son œuvre, lui qui, comme Boileau, cent fois sur le métier… La musique y est plus prégnante que dans la première partie du cycle. On pourrait lancer l’hypothèse que le compositeur s’est plus servi de la parole comme moteur dans la première partie du cycle (Sous le regard d’un soleil noir), territoire des adultes, et qu’il a plus besoin d’enrobage sonore pour aborder le monde de l’enfance, plus fugitif et plus intuitif. Le discours de deuxième niveau est donc plus utilisé.

S’inspirant fortement des travaux de Bruno Bettelheim sur les contes pour enfants, de manière un peu trop soulignée en un certain passage, Dhomont tente d’allier discours fantastique et séduisant (on pense parfois à des trames sonores d’Hollywood) à celui plus exigeant de la confrontation avec des utilisations acousmatiques pures et dures (la «fureur humaine»). Le résultat est fascinant. Comme par exemple, dans le début de la troisième partie où la trame narrative est claire et efficace. Des sons «bizarres» et tout à coup une chaude voix de femme qui dit «Ce n’est rien» et plus loin: «Qu’est-ce qui se passe?».

Oui, il faut vraiment écouter cela comme un conte de fées. Francis Dhomont se révèle ici un formidable conteur. Et même les enfants embarquent dans son périple, y comprenant bien ce qu’ils peuvent, comme nous d’ailleurs.

On oublie la technique tant tout cela est fait avec l’inéluctabilité de la vérité qui se dévoile. Je parle ici aussi bien de la réalisation sonore et de la mise en bande (équivalent à l’écriture de la partition pour Dhomont) que de la structure du propos. Un mélodrame, c’est avant tout du théâtre, et Dhomont se montre dramaturge trés original et sûr. Sitôt qu’on pense que la pièce va tourner en rond, arrive une clé — sons synthétiques, parole, sons familiers, Scènes d’enfants de Schumann, bruits connus — qui nous ouvre une nouvelle porte de perception et de compréhension. Encore une fois, Dhomont joue du Labyrinthe en véritable Dédale: il conçoit un édifice dans lequel on pénètre sans savoir comment on en sortira, chacun à sa manière.

C’est donc la partie forte du cycle qui se clôt ici. On a l’impression qu’on ne saurait applaudir: on est tellement pris par cette musique, que quand se fait le silence, on le cultive afin de mieux se pénétrer de ce qui pourrait bien être en passe de devenir une des réussites acousmatiques les plus grandes de cette fin de siècle.

Magnifique cadeau que cette mise en compact de la musique de Francis Dhomont. Vraiment, il faut saluer bien bas et avec une infinie gratitude l’initiative des Jean-François Denis et consorts pour avoir vaillamment produit ces disques magnifiquement et très originalement présentés, qui ne cessent de nous faire faire des découvertes et qui sont d’une qualité plus qu’exceptionnelle.

J’ai écouté trois fois la première partie du Cycle des profondeurs que l’on présente ici et qui s’intitule Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (je vous parlerai bientôt de la seconde, Forêt profonde), pour chaque fois me demander; «Mais qu’est-ce que cette cette musique de la non-musique a pour m’émouvoir si musicalement?»

Ce qu’on entend, c’est d’abord un texte qui s’inspire de la réflexion psychanalytique (fuyant donc tout le psychologisme facile) et de la difficulté de l’existence dans son sens le plus vaste. S’y allie cet intérêt de Dhomont pour orienter son message par une qualité littéraire certaine et sérieuse. On ne lit pas ce texte comme un poème; on le lit comme prétexte au poème ultime qu’est sa mise en sonorisation dans l’univers d’apparence discret du compositeur. Attention: en art, les apparences sont trompeuses!

Le verbe prend toute sa portée dans son contexte. Ici, il se conjugue avec un traitement subtil des mots dits, des significations orientées par le contexte musical. Ou alors serait-ce le contraire? Est-ce que la mise en forme de ce texte, la vraie porteuse de sens dans sa profondeur car la moins immédiate, ne serait-elle pas cet état béni de l’art musical que le mot nettement énoncé vient révéler à notre conscience acoustique?

On le comprend, le va-et-vient entre les formidables réseaux créés ici par Dhomont est infiniment riche. A chacun, donc, sa propre stratégie, dont l’effort lui sera récompensé par une émotion — oui, une véritable et profonde émotion — d’autant plus pleine qu’on désire recommencer l’expérience.

Le compositeur se fait Virgile et nous Dante. Le labyrinthe de l’Enfer, s’il est moins violent ici que dans les images apocalyptiques de l’Italien, n’en rejoint pas moins la même originalité, faisant renaître en nous cette quête d’un idéal nouveau. L’exploration est sombre.

Le court poème sur «l’m No One, l’m A No One» va peut-être servir de clé pour tout à coup comprendre à quel travail s’est livré le compositeur pour nous livrer sa pièce. Faites attention: le travail n’est pas la pièce. Cette dernière est le résultat du travail, ne serait-ce que celui d’une main tendue vers l’extérieur.

On ne trouve pas ici le plaisir léger des valses viennoises, confronté que l’on est aux douleurs de la «maladie mentale». Il y en a que cela choque, mais je suis sûr qu’ils admirent van Gogh. Alors, pourquoi se refuser de faire un autre type d’expérience esthétique? Physiquement, rien n’agresse. Artistiquement, on est pris, séduit et enrichit. Et aussi comblé.

Forêt profonde (which sadly translates as “Deep Forest” — remember that abysmally beige and blandish semi-Gnu Age array of ethnic samples and drum machines with the same name released three or so years ago?) is fabulous. Forêt profonde is the second part of, what is till now, a diptych (preceded by [Sous le regard d’un soleil noir]). A third part is imminent.

Styled an acousmatic melodrama, Forêt profonde is based on the fascinating book The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim, and it has gradually taken shape as a composition over fifteen years, culminating in two years’ final production. It is, like Bettelheim’s book, a guided tour of the childhood soul, which itself is nothing more than a return to the initiatory world — both cruel and reassuring — of fairy tales. The composition is divided into 13 sections (6 of which are purely instrumental) all of which contain some form of quotation from Schumann’s op.15: Scenes From Childhood. Texts by Hans Christian Andersen, Dante, Those Grimm Brothers, Shakespeare and of course Bettelheim himself are used in the piece.

The recurring theme in fairy tales of being lost in a forest (it’s up to you to work out the psychological parallels here) is reiterated here too. To anybody who has heard fairy tales, this image is unforgettable. As Bettelheim says, “… without fantasies to give us hope, we do not have the strength to meet the adversities of life. Childhood is the time when fantasies have to be nurtured.” Actually, this is probably the best CD I have heard so far this year. Monstrous. Unpredictable. Hallucinatory. It plays on the memories we all have that we connect to specific sounds. It is an intriguing voyage into familiar and dangerous territories where branches snap for no reason, where long shadows flit between the tree trunks and the passing breeze carries traces of wolf-breath. It’s the place where trapped birds are princesses, where the lure is golden, where banished sons become kissable frogs. Magickal slumber, castles and caves, locked rooms (with the key left in the lock, of course) and the endless growth of entangling vegetation…

Francis Dhomont was born in 1926 and studied under, amongst others, Nadia Boulanger and Charles Koechlin. His theoretical texts and essays are regularly published in various international journals, he lectures regularly and is the author of many radio programmes for national Canadian radio. He has received numerous prestigious awards and now divides his time between Québec and France, teaching electroacoustic composition and theory. These two releases are part of the same group of works titled “Cycle of Depths” (Cycle des profondeurs), which is comparable to his previous “Cycle of Wanderings” (Cycle de l’errance), not only available on empreintes DIGITALes but also on BVHAAST, a Dutch label partly lorded over by Willem Breuker.

Sous le regard d’un soleil noir or “Under The Glare of A Black Sun” to folks like you and I was originally produced in 1979-80, completed in 1981 and since then has won a bunch of awards for electroacoustic composition. It was inspired by the works of British psychoanalyst Ronald D Laing (author of The Politics of Experience and The Divided Self and one of the first in his profession to explore the potential of LSD in analysis), and tells the story of a slow descent into madness. The spoken texts are quoted from the works of Laing, Plato, Kafka and Buchner. The piece makes us share the anxiety, anguish and solitude of the schizophrenic, attempting to present us with a sonorous image of a (mostly) inaccesible world. Laing himself once said “I cannot experience your experience, or vice versa.” Dhomont presents the experience he thinks they (schizophrenics) have, constructing a more general myth through which the ‘normal’ man may discover his own schizoid traits. Sous le regard d’un soleil noir tells us about ourselves, about the terrifying solitude that faces every man, as if we are sitting at the end of a cavern capable only of looking ahead. There is certainly an element of underlying danger here — not from external forces but rather from those sharp, shiny, sterile, surgical razors with which we perform psychological surgery on ourselves as we lay on a ramshackle operating table constructed out of our belief systems which itself is placed in a dimly lit corner of a huge reverberant space. Bats in the belfry. Too many toys in the attic. No room to spare in this warehouse where ominous chords pace the staves… This is the domain of archetypes.

A superb concert took place at Montréal’s Usine C last Saturday June 8. Organized by ACREQ, this concert of music by Francis Dhomont was one of the most beautiful acousmatic music events I have attended in a long time. Thanks to the excellent acoustics of this new hall, to the high quality of the sound projection system and to the large number of speakers, the details of this outstanding music were, I believe, faithfully rendered.

In the program were three acoustmatic works: Lettre de Sarajevo, Nocturne à Combray and a recast and augmented version of Forêt profonde.

The first piece, Lettre de Sarajevo, is an acousmatic drama commissioned by the “Futura 96” Festival of Acousmatic Art in France. This work’s complex texture, composed of a rich tangle of layers that successively come to the fore before being overtaken by other soundtracks, creates an atmosphere of constant anxiety. I recognized here the characteristic sound colors, the deep sounds, sometimes guttural, used in many of Dhomont’s works. But this style of composing in large sections, in long shapes that move along until their natural end, appears to me unusual for his work, at least for the works from his “Quebec period”. Without the ruptures, the sudden interruptions, the dramatic stops or the alternating tensions and releases, Lettre de Sarajevo is dominated by constant, uninterrupted tension, and the silences between sections form so many shadow zones where the drama of the preceding sequences still resonate. Lettre de Sarajevo is a beautiful, dark and inexorable work, a tranquil cry, unceasing as it reflects the drama that endures even as the memory fades.

From another era and another sensibility, Nocturne à Combray is a radiophonic piece commissioned by Radio–Canada and is based on excerpts from Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann. Lost time is forever, and dream blends with reality. In Nocturne à Combray, the sonic material is allusive and dreamlike, dotted with nostalgic quotations (of illusory time recovered?) that evoke several errant recitals by musical instruments of the past. The work is often punctuated by fugitive images of beings and things remembered by a half–conscious narrator in the grip of an agitated sleep. The setting of the voice approaches that of earlier works by Francis Dhomont but here, it seems to me, it is more luminous so wedded to the contemplative nature of the text. This setting, generally stable and well established, is defined at the start of the piece by a melody of spatial relationships and timbres that suddenly transforms words into colorations and different spaces. At certain times, a counterpoint of voices fed by an echo lightly veils the intelligibility of the words a little like those stubbornly resonated in a mind that vacillates between wakefulness and sleep. To each their own reading of In Search of Lost Time, I certainly discovered in Nocturne à Combray a poetic, Proustian atmosphere.

Once upon a time in a deep, dark forest… Forêt profonde, an acousmatic drama based on the Psychoanalysis of Fairytales by Bruno Bettelheim, is a work in thirteen sections and forms, with Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (composed over thirteen years), a diptych that the composer entitles Cycle des profondeurs. Those apparently innocent stories that bathed our childhoods are really trees that hid from us the mysterious roots of the forest, the deep roots the soul of Francis Dhomont probes in his psychoanalytical reading of fairy tales. This composition superimposes a rich counterpoint of voices, texts and languages. At the heart of its gripping sonic material, illustrations successively more mysterious and consoling, building like a fairy tale, we hear thirteen episodes march by keeping us spellbound.

Francis Dhomont plays in Forêt profonde with archetypes, not just the ones the narration brings (death, happiness, courage, fear and so on), but as well those that can be invoked by the underlying sounds. So the archetype of comforting and appeasement, suggested by tender lullabies, is brusquely broken by the tragic and anguished character of unstable morphologies. This work enchanted me, bewitched by certain enigmatic passages that show at what point the art of sounds does know how to explain the unexplainable. “What’s going on?”, murmurs an anxious, strange voice at the start of the work. An undeniable reality hides behind the words that then wants to reassure the child, “It’s nothing, my dear. Try to sleep…” So life turns us aside with certain comforts about the morbid thought of our next disappearance.

Didactic comments here and there throughout the work perhaps don’t make for unanimity (a narrator cites Bettelheim on occasion) but, to my mind, it gives the work an extra dimension by drawing attention to the unconscious significance of fairy tales.

To sum up, I say Forêt profonde is a gripping and beautiful work that, I believe, will complement the success of Sous le regard d’un soleil noir. Both works will soon be released on the empreintes DIGITALes label.

The concert projection by the composer did justice to the quality of these works. At times I would have appreciated higher sound levels, particularly during Forêt profonde, but I know the listening situation probably varied a lot depending on where you were sitting in the hall. I can only congratulate ACREQ for having organized an acousmatic concert of such a high quality, especially since such events are all too rare in Montréal these days.

—Stéphane Roy (English translation by Frank Koustrup)

Stéphane Roy royst@ere.uMontréal.ca is a composer. His pieces have been performed in many European and American countries, and he has won many national and international compositions. A PhD in Music composition, he is presently teaching auditory perception at the University of Montréal.

Translated from French.