I don’t pretend to know a whole lot about electroacoustic music. I’ve picked some stuff up over the last few years, but I still lack the appropriate perspective — I can’t help approaching and assessing electroacoustic compositions on the basis of conventions better suited to rock music. Though many works within the genre have far more to do with mathematics and sculpture than with songwriting, I continue to look for the music.

When you’re talking about a composition that sounds like loose change falling out of someone’s pocket and onto a multi-tiered metal scaffold, or a song made up of oddly-spaced taps on a series of fine-tuned cabinet doors, it’s easy to understand why pop music fans don’t gravitate to this stuff. Deprived of the recognizable verse/chorus/verse structure they savor, they’re looking for spectacle. That’s why Sondes is a good bet — both for newcomers to electroacoustic composition, and for old hands bored by bland, self-indulgent works.

Smith writes for a combination of acoustic instruments and found-sound tapes, creating mixed electroacoustic music. He makes use of instruments with distinctive voices — double bass, cello, alto flute and even accordion — and pairs them with truly striking sound effects. From the first seconds of InsideOut, which delivers a veritable “Dolby jolt,” you’ll realize that this is an album for active listeners — and for headphone fans. InsideOut is a fever-dream of sickness, referencing everything from horror-movie stringwork to feverish bodily operations. Elderly melodies are reanimated and forced to clatter across the soundscape, frightened onward by bursts of percussion. Despite a wealth of activity over several movements, the piece ends where it began, its energy nullified like an interrupted dream.

Less frenetic, Liquid Fragments 1 uses double bass and alto flute to envision music as experienced from inside the human body. It is full of activity, but somehow detached; we recognize the transition from calm to motion, and can almost identify the cause, but we lack the perspective required to understand it.

Elastic Rebound and Continental Rift are small scale sonic metaphors for grand-scale events, addressing the infinitely slow negotiations of geographic masses in a sped-up, confrontational style. The latter work makes liberal use of cello, including a series of striking classical references at its midpoint.

The Unmoved Centre is a conversation between sounds. The listener will hear an aural community come together as disparate musical and mechanical sources are woven into a dance of call and response, tiny movements negotiating for position within a greater sonic whole. Headphones, closed eyes and darkness will pay off nicely here.

Finally, the striking Convergence co-opts the accordion — an instrument, as Smith states in his notes on the piece, “commonly associated with fun, dance, drinking and local cultural events.” Though filled with moments of dissonance, the piece also bubbles with carnival-style musical humor, dispensing fragmented polkas that encourage the listener to dance amid the confusion. Though its focus occasionally descends to music-box mechanical details, Convergence remains fascinating, and sounds like an afternoon spent sharing hallucinogens with Astor Piazzolla.

Though it has its obtuse moments, most listeners will find Sondes to be a thoroughly vibrant and exciting journey, bubbling over with brain-tickling energy. Smith’s source material is rich in texture and subtlety, and you’ll experience great joy in discovering the finer details in his work.

Can a pop song enthall you like this? I doubt it.

Hans Tutschku a commencé a étudié le piano très tôt déjà, pour ensuite étudier les compositions électroacoustiques à Dresden et à La Haye. Il a donné plusieurs concerts avec son ensemble Intuitive Musik Weimar et a enseigné dans diverses universités, comme Sao Paulo, Singapore ou Budapest. Il enseigne actuellement à l’Ircam. Ses travaux s’apparente à une réelle approche et étude des sons acoustiques les plus divers. Un travail intransigeant et intelligent, où chaque sonorité est soumise à discussion. La provenance des sons se situe dans la rue, les églises, les villes…etc. Un travail important sur la parole est effectué, en prenant plusieurs couches successives d’un poème, renforçant sons sens intrinsèque, agrémenté de sons caractéristiques s’y rapportant (… erinnerung…). Chaque échantillon sonore constitue la base d’un important travail sur les sons, qui une fois structurés, apparaissent sous un nouveau visage magnifié. L’importance de la voix humaine et des percussions prend toute son ampleur sur Die zerschlagene Stimme, où chacun des deux éléments se superposent pour ne donner qu’un. Sieben Stufen reprend un poème de Georg Trakl. Verfall, enregistré en deux langues et structuré sur la construction et la destruction du texte par couche superposées.

Un excellent travail pour quiconque prend le temps et la résolution de s’investir intellectuellement dans un travail intense sur les sonorités communes nous entourant. Vous n’écouterez plus tous ces sons de la même façon…

Une œuvre intelligente et recommandée dans le domaine de l’électroacoustique.

Glenn Gould, in an article accompanying the LP The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, wrote that Wendy Carlos’ prime motivation for synthesizing baroque music was to utilize “the available technology to actualize previously idealized aspects of the world of Bach.” Judging by the name of the CD label and the composer’s choice of Wilhelm Muller’s set of poems, Die Winterreise, one might expect that Daniel Leduc uses technology to “actualize” Schubert’s famous setting for male voice and piano. Indeed, another living composer, Hans Zender, wrote a new realization of Die Winterreise a few years ago. Leduc, however, sets himself a different task: to use ‘soundscape’ for metaphorically illustrating both the poetry of the title work and the themes of the other pieces on the disc. He does not refer to Schubert in the liner notes, although he follows Schubert, rather than Müller’s, ordering of the poems.

What we have, then, are twenty-four miniature sonic evocations of the short poems, followed by a coda. In most of the settings the voice recites the poetry clearly, but, as Leduc intended, it always “gives way to the sound landscape.” Thus, the voice is occasionally covered up unintelligible, or heavily processed (as in traks 14-16, 21, and 23-24). The actor Erwin Potitt recites the poems beautifully. Leduc treats each poem as a distinct musical entity, with the music ending. pausing fading, or cutting off abruptly. He illustrates frequently and carrefully words referring to sounds. The wind mentioned in the first line of the second poem is incorporated into the music accompanying the first poem. Most of the soundscape illustrations, however, are synchronized with the poems, making the contradictions all the more interesting.

For example, [track 8] On the River (Auf dem Flusse) asks in its first sentence why the loud river became quiet, but Leduc presents water noises through most of the piece, saving the quiet section for the end. Similarly, he introduces recordings of songbirds (which Müller does not mention in the poem entitled The Crow (Die Krähe [track 16]) to contrast bleak electronic imitations of crows. The songbirds serve as a bridge, despite the pause between the two pieces, to the next poem, Last Hope (Letzte Hoffnung) [track 17].

For this listener, three of the settings stood out from the others. [Track 9] Looking Back (Rückblick) effectively collages together different types of sounds; Rast consists of slowmoving electronic sounds and filtered noise, with high-pitched repetitive sounds reminiscent of Ryoji Ikeda’s work; and The Signpost (Die Post) creates, with its quiet, blurred sounds, a feeling of ambiguity similar to that heard in some of Nono’s electronic music.

The remaining three works also consist of miniatures, with the longest section clocking in at 4:19. The opening piece, which won the Public Radio Award, is titled Impressionistic answer given by Josef K. to a French tourist walking by the railway station at the end of a winter’s evening (Réponse impressionniste donnée par Josef K. lors d’une fin de soirée hivernale à une touriste française qui passait en face de la gare). Another short work, Traverser les grandes eaux, was inspired by a phrase from the I Ching. A longer piece, Troposphère, consists of four works named after different types of clouds.

“HAAAaaa, ha ha ha,” laugh the electronicallv modified voices at the beginning of Le renard et la rose (the fox and the rose), the opening track of Figures. Normandeau calls this part of the piece “Babbling and Rhythm.” As evident from my bumbling attempt above, it is difficult to transcribe such simple and important things as different types of laughter. We use twenty or thirty thousand words to exactly specify all types of complex thoughts, but when it comes to sound we don t even have a universal transcription system. Musicians are, rightly or wrongly, the only ones given permission (and responsibility) to convey specific meanings through sound alone, without the aid of words. On this disc, Normandeau specifically deals with onotnatopoeia, rhetoric and figures of speech. His refined ear is the perfect mediator in wedding linguistic concerns with sophisticated electronic music.

Like all four works recorded here, Le renard et la rose has multiple layers of reference: 1) the title itself; 2) Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince; 3) two earlier compositions that are part of the same cycle; 4) vocal onomatopœia; and 5) five states or feelings “experienced in adulthood.” The composer bases the work “exclusively on the use of the voice.” It is a rich tapestry usually built of dense electronic layers of sound, and covers a lot of territory in its fifteen minutes.

Figures de rhétorique (Figures of Speech) is a fourteen-minute work for tape and piano. Like Nono during the composition of … sofferte onde serene …, Normandeau worked with the pianist while writing the piece, and engaged Jacques Drouin’s interpretation to such an extent that he calls the recording “his (Drouin’s) version.” In contrast to Nono’s piece, Figures de rhétorique has a much more energetic feeling, but the melding of the electronics with the live piano sound is integrated just as seamlessly and beautifully.

Guitarist Arturo Parra’s contribution to Ellipse (Ellipsis) is less clear. Parra commissioned this work, and it sounds as though Normandeau used recordings of his guitar playing as the basis for the electronic sound. Ellipse, it seems, was originally intended as the tape part of a guitar and tape duet, but the composer now treats it as a purely acousmatic piece without live accompaniment, separate but related to the tape used in the guitar and tape piece, L’envers du temps. Ellipse, the composer points out, “is the art of not saying everything, of omitting words… and of then allowing… the listener to fill in the blanks.”

The one piece on the disc that does not refer to linguistic matters is Venture. This work is named after the rock group The Ventures, and Normandeau built his electronic piece from fragments of rock music from the ’60s and ’70s. As with his modification of actors’ voices in Le renard et la rose, the composer completely alters the source sounds, leaving only occasional snippets recognizable. Although Venture is based on rock music, the isochronous rhythms that define that genre are virtually absent from the piece.

This is a fine disc. Le renard et la rose won the Golden Nica award at the 1996 Ars Electronica competition and appeared on their compact disc series, as well as on discs issued by CBC Records and by Innova. The other three works appear here for the first time. One senses the depth of thought behind these works, and I would like to find out more about how the composer turns linguistic concepts into particular sounds.

Had you told Wilhelm Müller (1797–1828) that the depressive and forsaken words he spoke through the voice of the bewildered and forlorn traveller in the final edition of Die Winterreise in 1824 would live and flourish into the 21st century, and even appear in an electroacoustic guise — could he perceive that! — he would surely have banked hard out of your trajectory and seeked out saner company!

However, this is what has happened, and the lonely and desperate winter traveller, lingering on happier summer days with a woman who would turn out to be deceptive, does turn up again in the electroacoustic workings of Daniel Leduc (1965) from Montréal. This goes to show that some writings keep there urgency throughout the ages, since man is the same now as then — just in a changing human environment – and since words that speak out of commonplace and universal experiences always will be recogonized and validatet by man wherever in time he happens to find himself.

This CD also contains a few other works by Daniel Leduc, but here I will concentrate on the main piece; Le voyage d’hiver.

Leduc hereby steps into a tradition of electroacoustics, which can be traced back well into passed decades of creative sonic illustrations. When best these auditive variations serve the purpose of furthering the understanding and the experience of the text, in the same manner as the Bible illustrations of Gustave Doré from the 19th century magnifies the events of biblical times in a way that can never be forgotten by those who grew up with them.

Sometimes these re–workings of old texts serve as a casting of a conjuration net across existence, through their old and liturgic–like forms. There can be no question about the need of such liturgies in modern society and it’s art, to handle the existential anxiety that brews just below the surface of urban man, showing up in dreams and erratic behaviour. A culture without ceremonies and liturgies slides down a sloping plane. The rites of human societies do however exist everywhere, though they may be surpressed in the materialistic world of today. However, there are many beautiful examples of life in ritualistic societies, permeated by ceremonies. The Aka pygmies of Central Africa, for example, sing a special song for the child who just has gotten a little brother or sister, so the older child won’t feel rejected or cast aside. This is civilization!

When it comes to modern electroacoustic presentations of old texts, the majority of works are of religious origin. Moreover, most of these works have sprung out of the French speaking sphere, like France or Canada. A random list can look like this: Pierre Henry’s Apocalypse de Jean and Messe de Liverpool, Jacques Lejeune’s Le Cantique des Cantiques and Messe aux Oiseaux, Michel Chion’s Requiem and Xavier Garcia’s Apocalypse.

The secular works are more sparse, but they exist. Examples might be Jean Schwarz’s amazing Quatre Saisons — a setting of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Vier Jahreszeiten from 1797 — François Bayle’s Purgatoire & Paradis terrestre — an electroacoustic rendering of The Divine Comedy by Dante, which also might be referred to as religious, of course… – and the work we talk about here; Le voyage d’hiver — a set of twenty–four poems by Wilhelm Müller (1797–1828) from 1824, made famous by Franz Schubert’s composition.

I have always had great pleasure in listening to the great interpretation given by Hans Hotter (baritone) and Gerald Moore (piano) in a recording from 1954, which I rate as a first choice of a traditional lieder interpretation of the work in question. It is of course very interesting to hear how Daniel Leduc treats the material in an electroacoustic manner. Well, there is nothing new or surprising about the way Leduc traverses these poems. He has done it in a traditional way, electroacoustically speaking, and he has succeeded very well. His work compares well to the aforementioned electroacoustic variations on old texts, and in this tradition he now belongs, without any disturbing glitches or anomalities. The text appears in it’s original language — German — and the words are spoken by Montréal actor Erwin Potitt. Daniel Leduc uses musique concrète–methods in addition to the pure electronic alterations, applying concrete and altered concrete sounds around the text, and he utilizes established methods of permutating the voice itself.

After the twenty–four poems he has added a short concluding “coda” without words, rounding off this very well worked–through piece of art, which in itself is an homage to poets of the past, in a setting of today.

These kind of works give a continuation through the flow of time, and a sense of belonging, a sense of direction, and a time for contemplation. It is a great pleasure to receive all these re–workings and variations of old but timeless pieces of art. They build bridges from yesterday to today and back, and on these bridges we can walk back and forth, and truly feel that all places are here, all times are now!

An analysis of Wilhelm Müller’s text and the circumstances around Schubert’s setting can be found at: www.bway.net/~hartung/schubert.html and more on Schubert and Winterreise, for example translations, can be enjoyed at: www.gopera.com/winterreise/.

[This review was also published in Sonoloco Record Reviews]

Comment présenter objectivement cet enregistrement, ou plutôt ce recueil comprenant divers enregistrements autour d’une même thème (le bruit) sans paraphraser les notes du livret, bien informatif? Que chacune des six pièces se veut une interrogation sonore d’un ensemble de sons bien précis et souvent dérangeants, issus de notre environnement quotidien (voiture, bruits de toilettes, le téléphone), économique (la bourse) ou existentiel (réminiscence d’images sonores des mythologies de l’enfance)?

Faut-il rappeler que d’une certaine manière (et cela n’est pas mentionné dans le livret), les Beatles — il ne s’agit pas de ‘bruit’ bien sûr, mais Robert Normandeau, avec Venture [CD Figures, IMED 9944] (cf. R&C#42) les avait déjà mis à contribution! — eux aussi font partie des réminiscences adolescentes? Un des paramètres de Vroum (pour la voiture) est en effet emprunté à Drive my Car (et pourquoi pas le ‘car crash’ de Revolution Nr. 9 qui aurait, selon quelques rumeurs de l’époque, coûté la vie à McCartney?). Sans parler de Toilet Piece de Yoko Ono dans l’album Fly!

Tout est en fait dans l’art et la manière de procéder. Chaque pièce est en fait une compilation en soit d’une multitude d’enregistrements thématiques (simples bruits, voix, effets électroniques), juxtaposés, superposés, mis en boucle, suggéres, etc. Et c’est ce travail minutieux qui surtout retiendra l’attention de l’auditeur, qui, au-delà de l’anecdotique, appréciera surtout le doigté, la maîtrise de la mise en œuvre, la capacité de l’amener à découvrir un nouvel univers pourtant familier.