Deuxième fin de semaine de Soundings… du 2 au 4 février 2007 au Reid Concert Hall à Édimbourg (Royaume-Uni). Au programme, des œuvres de Adrian Moore, Pete Stollery, Jonty Harrison, Francis Dhomont, Natasha Barrett et plusieurs autres.

Arturo Parra jouera l’intégral de Voz, pour guitare et expressions vocales, le 15 février 2007 à la Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges à Montréal. Cette pièce sera disponible sur disque Atma Classique au printemps prochain.

Le 3^e concert du Cycle de concerts de musique par ordinateur 2006-07 fait honneur à la Belgique et à Musiques & Recherches. En effet le concert du 29 mars 2007 à 12h30 à l’Amphi X de l’Université Paris VIII (France) présente des œuvres de 4 compositeurs belges — Stephan Dunkelman, Ingrid Drese, Elizabeth Anderson et Annette Vande Gorne — et le Français — Philippe Mion — y ayant œuvré.

L’œuvre Topographie de la noirceur de Martin Bédard a été sélectionnée pour le 16^e Florida Electroacoustic Music Festival (FEMF) qui se tiendra du 12 au 14 avril 2007 à la University of Florida à Gainesville (ÉU). La pièce traverse l’Atlantique pour être présentée le 24 mai lors du 4^e et dernier événement du 9^e Cycle de concerts de musique par ordinateur 2006-07 à l’Université Paris VIII (France).

Understand — it’s an evening of electroacoustic music.

At centre stage there’s a chair and table. A box sitting on the table emits a pinpoint red light. Cables sprawl from the box onto the floor and lead off stage.

Both the stage and the audience sit in the dark, for there’s nothing to see, and there are no musicians on the stage.

The sound technician, Paul Hodge, stands with his control boards and monitors in the middle of the audience. Hodge will end up being as much a performer as each of the composers who work at his side to control and alter their pre-recorded electroacoustic music, music which is not produced by musical instruments.

For its part, the audience has comfortably huddled together in the centre of their rows in order to sit in a sound universe produced by four strategically placed speakers. The audience sits, waiting for ‘playback.’

Ann Southam’s Fluke Sound (1989), with its mysterious, late night mood, was a composition of measured and well-placed sounds recorded from three Revox open reel track tape recorders and two Synthi AKS voltage control synthesizers. Southam’s piece was largely characterized by a ringing telephone sound that continually rang and rang as a connecting motif through the criss-cross and layered waves of new sound that kept dropping in and later faded out entirely. The ‘fluke’ in the title refers to the lucky coincidence of making a new composition by putting two separate compositions together.

The historical part of electroacoustic music was beautifully represented by György Ligeti’s pioneering pieces, Glissandi (1957) and Artikulation (1958). This ‘historical’ reference does not mean to say that the recently departed Ligeti (1923-2006) is anything but startling, original, and always exciting to listen to. Glissandi — with its opening sensual sound like a steel guitar glide — is a beautifully imagined exploration of all manner of glissandi — the short, long, burpey, and longer. Artikulation is all about the tissue of sound that results when new sound elements meet. It starts with the sound of huge water gurgles as they mutate into electronic droplets and then become highly animated, electronic atmospheres.

Meanwhile, the symphonic dimension (or the grand gesture) of electroacoustic music was represented by Gilles Gobeil’s often exciting and occasionally nervous-making Ombres, espaces, silences… (2005) and by Robert Normandeau’s more intellectually planned out (or so it seemed) composition, Palimpseste (2005, 06).

Palimpseste — with its recorded and manipulated vocal sounds — was crafted by Normandeau into five sections, each with a different rhythm, timbre, dynamic, emotional quality, and space. At times it was unclear when the piece was finished, but what touched the audience was the audible scope and ambition of this inter-layered composition, whereas Ombres, espaces, silences… by Gobeil — which started with a loud wind storm and a vast scale ‘THX sound’ — grew dramatically and surely into a true ‘cinema of the ear.’ ‘Cinema of the ear’ is Normandeau’s phrase to describe his composition Palimpseste, but to these ears, ‘cinema of the ear’ better describes Ombres, espaces, silences…. Notable were its quick jabs of violence and loud cosmic door slams; plus its adventurous mixing of tones with noise in startlingly forceful ways that made Gobeil’s composition stand out as one of the more expressive compositions played this evening. The sounds seemed to emanate from deep space.

John Oliver’s Nylong Symphony (excerpt 2005) was a composition of electroacoustic music with a solo guitarist, Oliver himself, on stage. A drone established itself — and over and against it, Oliver played Flamenco and Middle Eastern styled passages, then he moved into an extended sequence where he rapidly ping-pong-ed single notes inside a vibrating framework that was like a suspended Flamenco guitar strum. While playing his guitar, Oliver was kept busy looking back and forth between the music on his stand and the computer screen, but despite all this activity, the music increasingly began to sound the same.

The most engaging compositions this evening were surely those with a clear sense of form — a holistic sense of form, perhaps, but nonetheless a sense of form — something which open-eared audiences intuitively respond to.

[January 13, 2007, Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto]

With petits Big Bangs, the empreintes DIGITALes label rights a painful wrong. This fully-packed album offers a stunning retrospective of Marcelle Deschênes’ electroacoustic works, from 1976 to 2002. If Deschênes is less known among musique concrete aficionados than Francis Dhomont, Jonty Harrison or even Robert Normandeau, it is mostly because she has devoted a considerable amount of energy to pioneering multimedia and pluridisciplinary works that cannot be documented on LP or CD. The six tape pieces presented here reveal a sensitive and whimsical composer possessing the plastic flair of Dhomont, the unsettling poetic sense of a Michel Chion, and a personal touch that empowers her music with a level of immediacy rarely attained in that most abstract field of music. The post-apocalyptic Big Bang II from 1987 opens the album with a commanding ballet of dynamic extremes. Indigo and Le bruit des ailes, both more recent, are elegant compositions with sombre undercurrents that keep dragging the listener along in search of their ever-deeper meanings. The two longer tracks of the set are also the oldest ones; if Lux (1985) fails to captivate through its whole duration, Moll, opéra lilliput pour six roches molles provides the album’s highlight. Written for clarinets, trombones, percussion, toys and tape, this “Lilliputian opera for six soft pebbles” is a fascinating piece of cinema for the ear, with a childlike lightness counterbalanced by disquieting water imagery. empreintes DIGITALes has released a handful of albums in 2006, some by household names and others by young up-and-coming composers, but the one that stands out is Deschênes’ petits Big Bangs, for its unique poetic qualities. This album has been released as a DVD. The disc contains the same six pieces in 96kHz/24bit MLP stereo (DVD-Audio), 48kHz/24bit standard stereo (DVD-Video), and MP3 files (DVD-ROM).