Soundings… finishes its 2004-05 season with another 4 concerts of international Sonic Art held at Reid Concert Hall (Edinburgh). On February 5, 2005 a concert by Adrian Moore will feature his recent work, Power Tools, as well as works by Christian Zanési and Beatriz Ferreyra. The following day, the concert “Sonic Environments” will present works based on real and imaginary soundscapes, featuring composers Pete Stollery, Paulina Sundin, and Natasha Barrett.

Francis Dhomont, nominee for “Premiere of the Year” at the Conseil québécois de la musique’s Opus Prizes, will begin in February 2005 a series of activities in Germany and in the United Kingdom. Firstly, he will attend a composition residency and will premiere his latest work, Brief an den Vater, commissioned by the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe (Germany) for the “trans_canada” event. Secondly, following an invitation from Sheffield University (UK), Dhomont will present his work Cycle of Sound and give a conference at Bath Spa University College. Lastly, the Cycle of Sound will also be featured at the Sound Junction III event, held February 26, 2005.

Chris Cutler wrote that John Oswald’s Aparanthesi is a meditation on listening — and it couldn’t be better said. That is the true nature of this piece, which, to begin with, may startle the average listener to the point of giving up… because what is it that you hear? Oswald supplies the longest liner notes I’ve ever seen, in an interview by Norman Igma — and I must say I found reading them quite useful, because the text sharpened and tuned my listening to certain properties and qualities that I otherwise may have missed, while all the while listening for something that isn’t there, instead of hearing what’s up front!

Still, this work — in it’s two versions — demands something of the listener. I wouldn’t call it easy listening… and perhaps you have to be in the business to really enjoy this more than a scientific experiment, a laboratory show-off. Knowing John Oswald’s approach to sound, though, I know his intentions are pure and honest — and we may extend our gratitude to empreintes DIGITALes who doesn’t shy away from issuing marginal releases from time to time, i.e. highly specialized ventures that probably won’t bring in a lot of funds, but which cast new light on the art of listening, the nature of sound.

One composer who unfolded the nature of sound already in the early 1950s — and who has never stopped — is Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose courses in Kuerten — and his seminars at those courses (usually amounting to about 18 CDs worth of talks each year!) — I’ve attended for a number of years as the official photographer, has made a distinction between seeing a number of objects in a constant lighting versus observing the same object under changing lightings… and he would be the right person to make the comparison, too, the way I’ve seen him work with both sound and light during endless rehearsals…

The key point is that we have to listen in a new way — a different way — to a work like Aparanthesi. The old, homey standards do not fit; they’re useless here, in which everything that happens at first does not appear to happen — since we’re naturally attuned to listen in a way that signifies an anticipation for what is not there; an elusive Godot that never shows up. We have to wish ourselves, with John Cage, Happy New Ears — and once we’ve got them, once we’ve ridded ourselves of forced concepts, we can truly enjoy Aparanthesi — and consequently other audibilities that we perhaps were not aware of before. I can compare it to my way of hearing birds before and after I turned an ornithologist. Before I just heard a maze of chirps, and after I could distinguish, I knew who was saying what, and I could, with my inner sight, envision beautiful plumages and migration paths and so forth; a new dimension of bird chirps! Anyway, the Stockhausen distinction above works fine concerning Oswald’s Aparanthesi, in which he works with a single pitch, the A, in version one at 440 kHz, in version B 480 kHz, i.e. the pitch of the electric current in the United States, from wirings, household appliances and so forth.

In Aparanthesi Oswald runs a number of sonic events or objects through the A mill, tuning a variety of sound sources — piano, cello, birds, cows, thunderstorms, wind and whatnot — to an A, tinkering with the overtone spectra, morphing the sounds in a way so that you really can’t say for sure exactly when a cow becomes wind or the piano a cello…

Oswald has calculated that it would be decent to assume that there are ten audible octaves, which is why he works with ten degrees of the A; dire dynamics! The composer investigates the possible varieties possible deduced from the single pitch A. Perhaps you could call it fundamental research!

He utilizes tow real world musicians for the piano and the cello, while all other sounds are derived from recordings of a variety of sounds; really any sound at all you can imagine, like birds and storms and voices — all naturally or synthetically tuned to an A.

When listening, be aware of the serious dynamics, because you may want to increase the volume dangerously when the level slips to the lower limit of hearing, volumewise or pitchwise, but then the sound may be so incredibly forceful and low-pitched that it will threaten your speakers. There are instances of cone flapping, so take it cautiously!

This is truly unfamiliar music to most of us, but why not compare it to the experience or theoretical experience of Rigpa, the state before all states in Tibetan Buddhism, that clear state of mind that can be likened to the sight of a starry sky as the clouds move away, that original state of consciousness out of which all thought-forms and consequent objects arise, and into which they sink back — like all sounds rise out of their original state of silence, into which they’re bound to sink; ashes to ashes, dust to dust — and silence to silence…

This is a magnificent piece of fundamental research. I think we will give John Oswald a strong A for it!

morceaux_de_machines, composé d’Érick d’Orion et d’A_dontigny, nous reviennent avec Estrapade, leur nouvel album qu’ils présenteront en concert ce dimanche à la salle O Patro Vys. Pour leur second opus, ils ont invité les vétérans Diane Labrosse et Martin Tétreault ainsi que le maitre des extrêmes, le Japonais Otomo Yoshihide. La musique de morceaux_de_machines est toujours aussi bruyante, mais grâce au travail de Paul Dolden à la post-production, nous y retrouvons cette fois-ci une touche de raffinement. Le titre de l’album renvoie à un supplice du Moyen Âge où un malheureux était attaché dans une position inconfortable à une potence. Selon A_dontigny, cela traduit bien l’esprit musical de l’album. Ça promet.

The ZKM — Institut für Musik und Akustik in Karlsruhe (Germany) presented the “trans_canada: Tendenzen in Akusmatik und Soundscapes / Trends in Acousmatics and Soundscapes” event on February 10 — 13, 2005. Four days of concerts and discussions organized by Sabine Breitsameter and Ludger Brümmer with 9 ZKM commissions and world premières by Canadian composers Francis Dhomont, Darren Copeland, Nicolas Bernier, Hildegard Westerkamp, Barry Truax, Louis Dufort, Robert Normandeau, and Gilles Gobeil along with conferences by Jean-François Denis, Christoph von Blumröder (Köln), Rudolf Frisius (Karlsruhe), and Daniel Teruggi (Paris).

For Radio-France’s Présences festival, Ina-GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales) presents the first edition of Présences “électronique” from February 17 — 20, 2005. Featuring composers Pierre Schaeffer, François Bayle, Taylor Deupree, Richard Chartier, Kim Cascone and many others.