Éros bleu
François Bayle
- Year of composition: 1979
- Duration: 4:40
- Instrumentation: stereo fixed medium
Stereo
La pièce utilise principalement des sons enregistrés dans le massif des Calanques à Marseille (France). Ces sons ont été traités par ordinateur au Studio 123 (informatique musicale) du GRM. Je remercie Bénédict Mailliard et Yann Geslin qui m’ont initié à cette puissante batterie de programmes. Je remercie également Daniel Teruggi pour son introduction au Studio 116 où la pièce a été mixée.
Les éléments de mixage comportent aussi diverses séquences synthétisées par ordinateur avec le programme MUSIC V à Marseille (Faculté des Sciences de Luminy et Laboratoire de mécanique et d’acoustique du CNRS).
Au début, et par instants, la pièce se présente comme une «phonographie», suivant le terme de François-Bernard Mâche — elle fait allusion ici et là à Luc Ferrari, Knud Victor, à Michel Redolfi, musicien de la mer, à Georges Boeuf et ses abysses, aux oiseaux chanteurs de François Bayle. Si je suis parti d’un petit nombre de séquences sonores — enregistrements de mer, d’insectes, d’oiseaux, de carillons de bois et de métal, de «gestes» brefs joués au piano ou synthétisés à l’ordinateur — je les ai multipliées en leur appliquant diverses opérations: moduler, filtrer, colorer, réverbérer, spatialiser, mixer, hybrider. Cézanne voulait «unir des courbes de femmes à des épaules de collines»: de même la synthèse croisée permet de travailler «dans l’os même de la nature» (Michaux), de produire des hybrides, des chimères — d’oiseaux et de métal, de mer et de bois… J’y ai eu recours surtout pour transposer des profils, des flux d’énergie. Ainsi la pulsation d’enregistrements de mer est par endroits appliquée à d’autres sons — alors qu’à d’autres moments les vagues ou déferlements sonores n’ont aucune parenté avec la mer.
Une échelle de hauteur (
Sud est une commande du Ministère de la Culture (France), à l’initiative du Groupe de recherches musicales de l’Ina (Ina-GRM) où la pièce a été réalisée.
The main sound source for Wind Chimes is a set of ceramic chimes found in a pottery during a visit to New Zealand in 1984. It was not so much the ringing pitches which were attractive but rather the bright, gritty, rich, almost metallic qualities of a single struck pipe or a pair of scraped pipes. These qualities proved a very fruitful basis for many transformations which prised apart and reconstituted their interior spectral design. Taking a single sound source and getting as much out of it as possible has always been one of my key methods for developing sonic coherence in a piece. Not that the listener is supposed to or can always recognize the source, but in this case the source is audible in its natural state near the beginning of the piece, and that ceramic quality is never far away throughout. Eventually, complementary materials were gathered in as the piece’s sound-families began to expand, among them a bass drum, very high metallic Japanese wind chimes, resonant metal bars, interior piano sounds, and some digital synthesis. The piece is centered on strong attacking gestures, types of real and imaginary physical motion (spinning, rotating objects, resonances which sound as if scraped or bowed, for example), contrasted with layered, more spacious, sustained textures whose poignant dips hint at a certain melancholy.
[xii-92]
Wind Chimes was realized in the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the University of East Anglia (UK) in 1987, with computer sound transformations carried out on the digital system of Studio 123 of the Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in Paris (France) in 1986. It premiered during the Electric Weekend at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on September 11, 1987. This piece was first released in 1990 on the Computer Music Current #5 compact disc on the Wergo label (WER 2025-2). Wind Chimes was commissioned by the South Bank Centre, London (UK).
To musique concrète and Pierre Schaeffer, its ‘ill-fated inventor’
“… one moment transported in beautified memories of the first ‘concrète’ illuminations of my childhood […]. Perhaps I was the only one to be so moved by the sound of these last ‘measures’…”
— Marie-Claire Schaeffer-Patris, personal letter to the composer.
Novars salutes the birth of musique concrète, the Ars Nova of our century, by calling upon the resources of the computer. The intention is not to create a pastiche but, on the contrary, to testify that by the most advanced means a language has been passed on. It may also be possible to suggest, without establishing a simplistic symmetry, that there exists a link between these two theorists of a new art: Vitry and Schaeffer.
The ‘classical’ ear will perhaps recognize fragments from Schaeffer’s Étude aux objets (1959) and Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (1364). These quotations, along with a third sound element — a sort of homage to Pierre Henry and his infamous door — are the sole materials giving birth to multiple variations.
A sign of change: ‘spectromorphologic’ (Denis Smalley) mutations give to sonorities of the Ars Nova and to ‘new music’ (as Schaeffer named it in 1950) the sound of our time. A sign of continuity: something from the original works (their colour, their structure…) remains present, indestructible.
François Bayle writes about Novars:
“In listening to the works of Francis Dhomont, one senses a unique voice.
One finds traits and signatures: long ‘breath-like’ trajectories, masterful alternations of deeply engraved forms and light refined lines, play with proportions and moving masses. Like in Chiaroscuro — one of his most successful — a baroque taste for timbral richness and shadowy contours, interrupted by identifiable fragments, often with vocal qualities, always alive.
There is a sense of accentuation and deep breathing, leading to a finely heard silence, framed and placed with the meticulousness of a photographer for whom every background detail counts as much as, and maybe more than, the foreground musical intentions.
Novars contains refinements that add fresh colour and new light to the work’s main purpose. The rhythmic cellular element is that of a slow dance based on a complex note, a pegged quotation (taken from the Étude aux objets by Pierre Schaeffer) and, detaching it from the ‘moiré’ vocal timbres (‘stirred up’ à la Machaut) projects on the work an evocation from the Pavane (for loved ones, certainly not dead!).
The breaths, thrusts, and ‘jetés-glissés’ (thrown-slid) of well choreographed gestures counterbalance the rhythmical accumulations forming a third sound character to this tale; a tale of time and contretemps, in riddle form.
Indeed, as the tale proceeds, it slowly unveils its sources of inspiration. Or rather: this unfolding comprises lengthy placements into perspective, of a distance towards quoted sources, with Tanguy-like otherworldly colours, of the beaches where this homage to the ‘revival’ evolves in “metal sky” (Giono) tonalities.
Dedicated “to musique concrète”, this piece gently illuminates its references and leaves us under its profound charm. As with … mourir un peu — is it its timelessness? — we are offered a strange yet beneficent moment of reflection.” (Paris, June 16th, 1991)
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Novars — 3rd of the 4 works in the Cycle du son — was realized at Studio 123 of the Ina-GRM (Paris, France) and at the composer’s studio and premiered on May 29, 1989, as part of the 11th GRM Acousmatic Concert Series at the Grand Auditorium of Rthe Maison Radio France (Paris). This piece was selected by the 1990 International Computer Music Conference (ICMC ’90) in Glasgow (Scotland), and by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) for the 1991 World Music Days in Zürich (Switzerland). The jury of the 1991 Stockholm Electronic Arts Award also selected it for performance at its award concert in Stockholm (Sweden). Special thanks to Pierre Schaeffer who has kindly allowed the quotation of a few sound propositions, now historic; and to Bénédict Mailliard, Yann Geslin and Daniel Teruggi without whose patience it would have been impossible to domesticate Studio 123 and the Syter real-time sound synthesis system of the Ina-GRM (Paris, France). Novars was commissioned by the Ina-GRM.