à la cire perdue
- Laurie Radford
- Year of composition: 2004
- Duration: 15:27
- Instrumentation: fixed medium
- Publisher(s): Yul média
- Commission: Réseaux des arts médiatiques
- ISWC: T9034732520
‘Cire perdue’ is a time-honored sculptural technique still in use today. It involves the covering of an initial sculptural model with wax prior to casting the object in bronze. During the casting, the wax melts and disappears, is lost, leaving the finished bronze statue as the final reflection of the artist’s work. This concept serves in à la cire perdue as a metaphor for the source materials employed which are submerged and often lost amid the ‘casting’ of transformations and reshaping of audio materials in the composition studio. More specifically, it involves the use of my own instrumental music as the source materials for these sonic experiments. The previous electroacoustic work, les ponts de l’espace II, reclaimed electroacoustic elements from some of my works for instruments, voices and electroacoustic music, and integrated them into new sonic environments. As in les ponts de l’espace II, à la cire perdue also offers fragments from my mixed works, albeit in disguise, to the electroacoustic world. The shapes and gestures of my instrumental music are lost in the processes of convolution, spectral mutation and cross-synthesis. They sometimes appear to emerge and give clear impetus to the music; more often, they pulse beneath the surface, and leave only a ghostly yet tantalizing echo of their origins.
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à la cire perdue was realized in 2004 at the composer’s studio and premiered on February 14, 2004 during the Rien à voir (15) concert series presented by Réseaux at Espace GO in Montréal. The trumpet material — also used in Verb Tales, and les ponts de l’espace II — is drawn from a recording of musician Franzl Fabijan made by Miriam Fabijan in 1992 in Slovenia. The piece was commissioned by Réseaux des arts médiatiques.
Preparation
- 1992, Miriam Fabijan • Slovenia
Composition
- 2004, Personal studio, Calgary (Alberta, Canada)
Premiere
- February 14, 2004, Rien à voir (15): Concert, Espace Go, Montréal (Québec)