Dans le ventre du dragon
Jean-François Laporte
- Year of composition: 1997
- Duration: 8:10
- Instrumentation: stereo fixed medium
Stereo
Premiere
- June 10, 1999, Concert, Le 102, Grenoble (Isère, France)
One of the themes put forth by Johnson explores the mandorla as applied to human consciousness, the place where light and shadow overlap, creating a field of unity in duality — the divine.
Neon represents the divine in the human consciousness expanded to an environmental scale.The work thus consists in the sonorization of a central theme: the expression on an environmental scale of a microcosm of non-sounding phenomena illustrating the opposing thoughts and feelings we experience in the human consciousness that now overlap and exist as a unified field. Since the unified field can be seen to symbolize more than the sum of its internal components, it led me to the choice of a variation of the Greek term neos literally ‘something new’, as a title.
The dense textures in Neon, which include sounds that contrast each other spectromorphologically to varying degrees, represent the co-existence of light and shadow. These textures develop over time until they climax and give way to new textures in which contrasting sounds are again placed in contexts where they re-affirm each other mutually.
Neon is the third and final electroacoustic work in a cycle that is inspired by the book Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche (1991) by Robert A Johnson (Portland, OR, USA, 1921).
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Neon was realized in 2000-01 at the electroacoustic studios of City University London (England, UK) and at the composer’s studio in Brussels (Belgium), and premiered on May 10, 2001 as part of the concert series Trois visages de la musique électroacoustique at the Chapelle de Boondael in Brussels. Much of the material for Neon was created in July 1996 in the studios at the Groupe de musique expérimentale de Marseille (GMEM, France). Neon was awarded an Honorable Mention at the Concurso Internacional de Música Eletroacústica de São Paulo (CIMESP ’01, Brazil).