La nouvelle pièce de John Young, Smoke and Mirrors (2008), sera créée le 12 avril 2008 dans le cadre de la série Multiphonies du GRM à la Salle Olivier Messiaen, à Paris (France).

Robert Normandeau et John Young participeront à la 7^e édition du Cultural Exchanges 2008 à la De Montfort University à Leicester (Angleterre, Royaume-Uni). Normandeau diffusera 4 pièces le 27 février 2008: Spleen, Murmures, Kuppel et Figures de rhétorique — cette dernière étant aussi interprétée par la pianiste britannique Sarah Nicolls. Le 25 février, Young diffusera pour la première fois Ricordiamo Forlì dans sa version Surround 5.1 (produite pour son DVD-Audio Lieu-temps).

empreintes DIGITALes lance aujourd’hui un CD et deux DVD-Audio:

• Elsa Justel (Argentine / France): Mâts (CD-Audio)
• John Young (Nouvelle-Zélande / Angleterre, Royaume-Uni): Lieu-temps
• Andrew Lewis (Pays de Galles, Royaume-Uni): Miroirs obscurs

empreintes DIGITALes poursuit l’offre de pré-commande (réduction de 20%) pour ses 3 prochains disques:

• Elsa Justel (Argentine / France): Mâts (CD-Audio)
• John Young (Nouvelle-Zélande / Angleterre, Royaume-Uni): Lieu-temps
• Andrew Lewis (Pays de Galles, Royaume-Uni): Miroirs obscurs

Cette offre de pré-commande à tarif réduit se termine le 10 décembre 2007.

empreintes DIGITALes annonce la parution très prochaine de 5 nouveaux disques (dont 4 DVD-Audio en «Surround 5.1»), tous en pré-commande offrant 20% de réduction.

• Elsa Justel (Argentine / France): Mâts (CD-Audio)
• Martin Leclerc (Québec): Horizons du silence
• John Young (Nouvelle-Zélande / Angleterre, Royaume-Uni): Lieu-temps
• Jonty Harrison (Angleterre, Royaume-Uni): Environs
• Andrew Lewis (Pays de Galles, Royaume-Uni): Miroirs obscurs

Certaines pré-commandes au tarif réduit se terminent le 29 novembre 2007.

An academic has won international acclaim for a piece of music he created about his parents’ courtship in Italy during the second world war.

John Young, reader in music technology at De Montfort University in Leicester, won first prize in a competition for electroacoustic music composition organised by the French Institut international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges.

Dr Young’s winning radiophonic work, Ricordiamo Forlì, was created at DMU during research leave. It tells the story of his parents’ courtship towards the end of the second world war.

“My parents met in Forlì in central Italy in 1944: my mother an Italian civilian and my father an 8th Army soldier. Chaperoned by my grandmother, they met as often as they could, and on one of these occasions my mother’s life was probably saved, as that day she was to have visited her sister — whose apartment was destroyed by a bomb at that exact time,” he explained.

“The idea for this work grew out of my first visit to Forlì in 2002, when a lot of the emotional significance of that story resounded for me in an entirely new way. Hearing bells from churches around the city — audible across great distances — gave me a strong sense of experiencing the sounds as something resonant of the place and its history; that these sounds were voices from the past — something permanent, yet alive — evoking a sense of being touched by something that others had experienced with the same immediacy over many years and through dark, violent times,” he said.

He used sounds he recorded in Forlì along with historical broadcasts and war correspondence reports to amplify the wider context of the events, while his father narrated the story. The result is a narrative supported by music developed by digitally transforming many of the sounds into an expanded “surrealised soundscape”.

The work will be released later this year by Empreintes DIGITALes in Montréal.