Stephan Dunkelman is a Belgian, born 1956, who composes for exhibitions (Charlotte Marchal, sculpture; Axel Miret, paintings [also represented with the cover of this issue]; Michèle Noiret, choreographies; Azniv Afsar, fashion design)

Of course the electroacoustic idiom is perfectly suited for these ends, even though this is the first time I’m aware of this art being utilized in the fashion business! However, I know that Swedish electronic music pioneer Ralph Lundsten sold his soul to the weapons industry with a piece to open the presentation ceremony of a new Swedish jet fighter, which eventually was sold to the new regime in South Africa, which one would think would have many domestic problems of poverty and education and fairness to deal with before bailing out all their money to the Swedish weapons sharks… so with that in view I certainly have no objections to this art accompanying the fashion movement, which, nonetheless, harbors sensuality and intuition too, while the weapons’ industry is 100% pure evil… no matter what Swedish double standards might say…

Dunkelman studied with legendary Annette Vande Gorne at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Mons, Belgium.

Stephan Dunkelman really is a “dunkel” man, in the German and Swedish meaning of the word; vague, obscure, mysterious… This became clear to me on spinning track one of Dunkelman’s new CD Rhizomes – Metharcana (1998) — under the bleak light of the laser beam. A beautifully rendered space of emerging spheres of shiny, metallic properties bring you into a state of hovering, of weightless existence in a shadow world between these soaring, tumbling spheres, of which you cannot get hold, ‘cause of their infinitely even surfaces…

Speed is appearing as an entity unto itself through the music, moving rapidly through this beautiful, but dusky and anonymous, extra-human spacescape… where sounds reminiscent of Bayle (Les Couleurs de la Nuit) or Parmegiani (La Création du Monde) artistry are scattered like sonic seeds of Christmas tree bliss… but all in the haze of a dream, a… hallucination… which appears in a world where humans have no say, where humans are not known, where the entities of existence swirl ’round cup grease, screws and bolts and anonymous machinery… and then, at 3:56, a surprise!

When I heard this the first time I was caught off guard, and instantly I was asking myself if I really heard what I thought I heard, or if I actually really was the victim of sonic hallucinations… because out of the speedily moving layers of dreamy, electroacoustic artistry a whisper rose, or rather swirled, round and around my head… and it appeared to me that it all sounded too familiar, until it suddenly dawned on me that the women who whispered spoke Swedish! I was completely unprepared for this on a Canadian CD featuring a Belgian composer, and the way in which the lingual aspect sort of rose hazily out of the rushing flow of sounds made the experience even more spectacular to the non-suspecting reviewer!

The “dunkel” aspect I mentioned initially is even more confirmed as the words and sentences uttered in this whispering female voice are not all clearly recognizable as to their content of meaning, but rather heard like loose thoughts inside someone’s head, registered on some fly-by extraterrestrial device inside one of the luxurious space ships of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy… Even more “dunkel” is Dunkelman’s way of not explaining who this Swedish whispering woman is, and what text she recites. I would like to be filled in on this! (If I am I will insert the information here!) As I look at the information on the sleeve I notice that Metharcana won first prize at the Stockholm Electronic Arts Award in 1998, so in there somewhere is a hidden explanation…

The effect of the voice, even if you can’t understand the language, adds even more of a dreamy, otherworldly or subconscious feel to the mix. Some of the whispers go: “Namnet på han som ritade kläderna” (“The name of the guy who drew the clothes…”, followed by “Jag tycker om att se på…” (“I like to look at…”), “…reklamen…” (…“the commercials…”), “…det gick inte, snart är jag gammal…” (…it didn’t work, soon I’ll be old…”). Ear-shattering (at least if heard through earphones) dark percussive effects pan wildly, hitting your tympanic membranes in a rage, as the whisper continues: “…tog bilder av mig; det var hans bilder, inte mina…” (“…took pictures of me; they were his, not mine…”), “…varje morgon när jag köper tidningen…” (…each morning as I buy the newspaper…”), “…namnet på han som ritade kläderna…” (“…the name of the guy who drew the clothes…”), “…jag tycker om att stå på perrongen…” (“…I like to stand on the platform…”) …and towards the conclusion the woman half whispers, half talks (for the first time), saying, again: “Jag tycker om att stå på perrongen, varje morgon när jag köper tidningen…” (“I like to stand at the platform, each morning as I buy the newspaper”), and the motion and commotion of the music is intense, to say the least.

It impresses me how good Dunkelman is at using a few elements of sound repeatedly, as sounding objects, inside the general haste of the forthwelling sound mass. Dunkelman writes in his introduction that he has used here material originally intended for a choreographic production. This piece should be played loud, like a rock n’ roll piece, so that you’re carried along in the forceful flow, while the whispers cut into your ears. Metharcana is a masterpiece!

The second work on the CD is Rituellipses (1993 – 1996). This is a work composed “by and for dance”, as Dunkelman, in his “dunkel” way puts it… he goes on to describe the piece thus:

The sonic objects, made from fragments of concrete or instrumental musical patterns, are swept along as if by [a] centrifugal force [but this description reminds the reviewer very much of the first piece too]. They follow each other in continuous rotational movements that only silence suspends. These studies of trajectory combinations are developed in short movements that are alternately lively, calm, restrained or uninhibited. […]

Stephan Dunkelman also lets on that he has had two movies in mind while he worked these sound worlds, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (shot on the island of Fårö, Sweden) and Night Sun by Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. The composer points out that these movies deal with the kind of over-arching relationship that man may have with, say, a tree or a rock, in an atmosphere of reminiscences of lost wisdom, of the oneness.

The panning is formidable in the piece, right from the outset, and if you listen over earphones you will get dizzy! Little sounds are percussed (a new word, I trust!) and thrown about wildly, but in clean-cut audio, revealing much sonic beauty, flashing by, back and forth and all around, in a magic display of spatial playfulness, of a kind refined to a state which I haven’t experienced before under the looking-glass of the laser beam! The sounds that are treated in this way seem to stem from all kinds of concrete sources, like perhaps kitchen ware, pebbles and whatnot – but they are extremely percussed (second time this word has been documented in semantic and etymologic history!) and panned, and enjoyed thoroughly by this listener, this connoisseur of auditory pleasure! Some parts bring in influences from the formidable Frenchman Jean Schwarz (Suite Symphonique & Gamma Plus), but also from American citizen Morton Subotnick (The Key To Songs & Jacob’s Room).

The repetitious patterns that arise lure you into a kind of shamanistic sphere, your eardrums vibrating in brain-tickling cycles, conjuring up visions of annual rings of old oaks and strata of rock, sideways up out of the African soil. In this music Time is a vehicle; a probe in which top soar, down the slopes of thought, of dream – of unintent.

Hanna’ Duet (1998) is, says Dunkelman, “a geometric replica, a simple reproduction of a segment of choreography.” The drumming sweeps by real close, tapping both your temples, while incisive sounds – sharp, edgy — slice through space like samurai swords. Tilting planes dance about in a display of arithmetics, somewhat like the sight of South American ants carrying leaves; ah, yes, it’s a South American ant leaf dance on a branch of a tree in the rain forest! Ant choreography gone electroacoustic in Monsieur Dunkelman’s studio!

Track 4 has a mighty title: Dreamlike Shudder in an Airstream Part 1: for a crumpled woman (2000). Cryptically, in a shroud of “Dunkelheit”, Dunkelman talks about the communion between the real and the unreal, and of possible venues between the two – and this piece deals with it; not a small feat! Initially immediately overpowered by a whole room of grouchy furniture falling over me I proceed cautiously through this incarnate philosophy, expressed in sound waves of utter beauty and edge. An armada of upset doorways clashes in a wooden pile just outside my ears. Intense rubbery and wooden friction mix with the squeaking of grumpy hinges cutting loose of angered door cases, while a cloud of grasshopper legs fall down as black, thin-lined precipitation from some perversion of cruelty to animals above, in some outcast dimension bordering ours in the uncertainty of quantum mechanics… Then screws and bolts that sweep past move so densely and so fast that all that remains is an acrid smell of speedy metal and a hovering trace of metal dust.

Sounds reaching out like distant, trapped human screams of horror seep out through a tormented mass of mangled iron bar sounds, but at times I think I hear the sounds of feet across the floor of a gym! The speed is – as in many of Dunkelman’s works – enormous, and there is no way you can keep up, but enjoyment is guaranteed! He has poured all and everything into his sound machines, but the result is perfectly balanced anyhow, in the grand scope of things. The conclusion of this piece is even a bit melancholy, stretching a thin line of distant strings across and beyond the sonic horizon…

Aquaéra 1 (1996) was Dunkelman’s first attempt to work with sounds sampled from the so-called real world. It’s a successful attempt, I do say, with many sounds that are readily identified as fenders squeezed between a boat and the quay, crows, distant light houses in the fog etcetera – but brilliantly woven into the commotion of sound flurries… because the typical Dunkelman spatiality is present already in this piece. The feeling is a bit desolate, lonely, forlorn… and very, very beautiful.

Signallures (1991) is Dunkelman’s earliest work on this CD. He has equipped the piece with a few imperatives, not so unlike Stockhausen’s performance instructions for Aus den sieben Tagen:

Discover all that trembles sin you. Ridicule all that eludes you. Leap, knowing you’ll fail. Come alive to yourself less cold.

The composer says he’s worked this piece with rubbing and striking and using the width and depth of the sound space to distribute the sounds. To begin with this work is more sparsely populated – sounded! – than the others before it. There is more space, more air, maybe, between the sonic objects, which appear and disappear like fragments, flakes of matter in a cold wind. It appears Dunkelman has used a zither or some other stringed instrument for some of the quirky, springy events. Already in this early piece the spatiality is important to Dunkelman, and very nicely executed as the sonic fragments, which sometimes are extended to sonic progressions, rise and sink, move away and come close. Perhaps it’s a harp that Dunkelman uses in a good part of the piece. As I travel further along the evolution of the piece is starts reminding me of works by Horacio Vaggione. This is a very nice piece of electroacoustics, a bit pointillistic, but the really amazing works in the Dunkelman oeuvre are to be found in his later output.

The last entry is Thru, Above and Between (1998), which is Dunkelman’s first work for radio. The composer says he has regarded the city (the sponsor’s subject matter for the piece) – here Brussels – as an imploding dream. Indeed there is an inward feeling to the sounds rising out of the sound magician’s hat. Rain and distant foghorns are swept in a shroud of timbrally shifting electronic drones, a whirlwind turning into a worldwind, and mighty halls or pathways or gallerias open up, wherein the simmering, shimmering sound of the crowd twinkles and glares, like a flood wave of humanity behind the walls of concrete and marble and glass. This music is like present day city life bending in on itself in a metropolic introspection and self-contemplation, in poetic arithmetics of sound waves, carrying the happy sounds of children as well as the forlorn thoughts of old-timers on the park benches, with souls like leaves swept away by the wind of fall…

Stephan Dunkelman’s electroacoustic sound world is one of the most interesting places I’ve been in contemporary art music. It’s been a true pleasure to venture through this rewarding sonic artistry.

Natasha Barrett (1972) has studied with some of my personal all-time favorites in the dominion of electroacoustics and sound art; Jonty Harrison and Denis Smalley. She has worked at BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre), which had a great impact on her aesthetics. A grant from The Research Council of Norway brought her across the North Sea to her current base in Oslo, Norway, where she teaches and composes.

She is fully at ease with works for instruments and live electronics, sound installations, dance, theatre and animation projects, but her heart and soul dwell in the acousmatic tape composition.

Track 1 – Three Fictions (Northern Mix) – is, as the title indicates, a revision of a work, revised in Barrett’s own studio. Each of the three sections glimpses a sight / sound / sensation. Each part also carries a short, haiku-like text.

A soft tuning in, fading in, to the fire of brush – or, as the poem suggests; the mind – pries open a meadow of elves’ bells and quirky birds of electricity, but deep murmurs of overgrown layers of clay reveal some geological unrest… until a myriad of grains fill the air to polish your face like a battalion of blast-lampas… Maybe the ringing of little bells disclose a silently treading group of goblins through the grass… but nothing is threatening…

Strong vibrations, frictional grindings, bubbling simmerings, shimmerings – a sudden laughter out of unreality, swallowed by silence like matter sucked into a black hole… rolling, shifting motions; deep murmurs onto which fragments of audio are sprayed… A woman’s vocal expressions rise softly, sparsely, like rare flowers in the forest, and a reminiscence of midday cloister bells of southern France glide by like a summer fragrance… Towards the conclusion the voice utters fully graspable sentences, evidently out of a poem, and the intensity of the rushing sounds increase.

A downward glissando, like a distant dive bomber at the end of WWII, and some inconspicuous closeness populated with screws and bolts of the age of industrial paraphernalia… caressed by solitary gamelan gongs along the curvature of the planet, the horizon shivering with bent light through the gravitational field, upheld by the virtual particles of quantum mechanics… and the World Cat meows and purrs, extremely closely miked behind interstellar clouds of Creation!

Natasha Barrett has inserted shorter interludes into the progression of works marching on like crouched shadows on a lithograph by Rune Lindblad through the sonic landscape on this CD. She calls these insertions Displaced:Replaced, and there are three of them: Fog, light wind — Wet and gusty – Gathering wind. As a further explanation she reveals that these brief works stem from a sound and visual installation that she set up with photographer Trym Ivar Bergsmo, who is also responsible for the CD cover and the photo of Natasha Barrett that I submitted with this review. The installation was designed to capture realtime meteorological circumstances and their effect on nature; hence the titles, which simply describe those circumstances.

Evidently, the move to Norway, but also an inherent affinity for, or intuitive understanding of, the interplay of human and natural forces, spirit and matter, has a decisive effect on the composer’s work. She has roots in the soil and the clay and the rock, and a soaring mind among the stars. She rides a slingshot through curved space!

Fog, Light Wind has a prickly notion hopping or sort of vibrating across the wet rocks of the shore, as an imagined sound of mist paints grayish colors across your ears… and I do believe I can sense Moomin Papa’s boat adrift between hidden islands in a combination of homeliness and bohemia – an impression you’d normally get in the October of the Finnish archipelago…

Red Snow is a spiritual, musical, account of Barrett’s impressions on moving to the land of Norway from Great Britain in boreal times. She says:

I moved to Norway in the winter. Leaving behind everything I knew, I felt increasingly aware of the environment: the variety of snow spiraling in the wind; intricate details of vegetation enhanced by crystal formations; the soft sun and bright landscape; footprints suggesting their own scenario… and the potential color lying dormant.

A moment – the sensual feeling of a moment – flashes by, then recedes… only to return with its catch of time residue, which then displays on the inside of your eyelids as the moment widens to encompass the holy NOW of FOREVER, the mighty HERE of all directions.

The spatiality of Red Snow is amazing, sweeping past and by, back and forth, hither and thither, up, down, front, back – and gathering a rare force of timbral colors; tempting, persuasive, instigating a let-go of every-day paraphernalia, to enter a shaman’s spiritual aloofness, as layer upon layer of existence are superimposed in an ever-changing kaleidoscope of sound dreams upon dark skies…

The beauty of this forceful music is grand; stretched bells, elongated through space-time, focuses the attention on minuscule motions-emotions, which in this spinning-top behavior are subject to intense study, their smallest properties taking on unknown, otherworldly appearances…

The music changes character, winds down into a slow breath of metallic specs riding murmuring infras in a thoughtful, spiraling circumspection, the open, saliva-running jaws of Bardo fantasies nearby – and concrete soundscapes open their little shutters onto peaceful still lives of crows and farmhands deep inside the music, and in the final shrill moments the work winds down into a winding bead of brilliant sonic pearls, rattling in shimmering reflections down the line.

In earphones this piece is a shattering, mind-blowing ride. Over heavy loudspeakers it moves your mind sky-high and your furniture around the room!

Wet and Gusty, the second brief meteorological sonic insertion, sounds like its title; like gusts of wind grabbing your coat or the makeshift sails of the raft of a childhood adventurer inside your forlorn memories – and there is a definite presence of some fluid that might well be water, in many sonic nuances; streaming, gushing – or just condensing on your window…

Viva la Selva! comes, says Barrett, in four continuous sections: Morning introduction (claiming territory), Midday heat (mad insects, mellow birds and lazy day dreams), Dancing at night (a frenzied bizarre), Dawn and rain (long live the forest!). This is the longest piece on the CD. It opens in a cicadish panning, in a subatomic jitter, elongated into a spacious bird expanse, meditative, pure… shining, rippling around its axes. Barrett fits well into the respected role as a true artisan of the audios in this extended work, which she displays in transparent visions, suspended like spider webs in the forest; that secretive, protecting forest into which you can run as civilization becomes too hostile for you; Natasha Barrett’s spidery, dewy sound webs sticking to your forehead amongst the spruce trees, the tiny kinglets squeaking up around the trunks, small balls of feathery life bopping inside the branchery. Almost human vocal sounds bring forth ideas of goblins and fleshy, meaty creatures rising like mushrooms out of the forest floor, raising their heads with those curious eyes above the fern…

Some sections are so deeply pastoral that they bring me into a forgotten orchard behind an old castle ruin on an island in Lake Båven in Sweden, which I came upon once when canoeing by myself across misty waters. Giant bumble bees, the size of sheep, murmur around you in this music, and the residue of evil intentions flutter around you in swarms of half-uttered morphemes… acrid, bitter…

The conclusion is even more mystic, like precipitation on the fern of a forest meadow, where the force fields of good spirits fondle the moment…

The third meteorological insertion is Gathering Wind. The initial sweeping, circling, spiraling gust is chilly, having you wrap your coat tighter around your anatomy, hat in face, bending towards the might that bears down on you… Like in the earlier cases, Barrett sketches these brief moments from out in the open with expertise and an uncanny feel for the character of each sound.

The Utility of Space is, says the composer, an exploration of spatial musical structure. This is also, like Viva la Selva! A rather long work, more than 13 minutes. It is, however, very different from that work, introducing itself in crumply, prickly, dry crackles and an absentminded, inward female voice, under the desolate drone of a distant airplane on high, far above the dark clouds, gleaming up there in the moonlight like a silvery fish across the reefs… The voice gets cut up and multiplied, sometimes lifting off the surface of the planet in clouds of sound dust… I get the impression of a chaotic, lonely mind, traveling the existence with big eyes and empty hands, timorous and bashful like an outcast fairy, like a bleak butterfly with wounded wings, dragging herself across these barren lands, searching for her death amongst the rocks and ravines of the pure arbitrariness of geology – and can anything be lonelier…

The sensation of a kind of Bardo walk increases along the duration of the piece, drifting over in a dreamscape, into the interior of a dream that blows through the inner expanses of a life not asked for but graciously given and humbly received…

Industrial Revelations is the concluding work on this precious CD of exemplary sound art; an art so subtle, so… compassionate and emphatic, towards all that has lived and will live, and towards the elusive NOW that is so infinitely short that it can only be described as the hypothetical interface of past and future, stretching and bending in the uncertainty of quantum mechanics… leaving us helpless… and the final words on this last piece, uttered by Natasha Barrett, go: “… the landscape will sing with machines…”. A bubbling, forceful but simmering mud flow sound overwhelms the listener, and inside the mighty, brown wall of sound sledge hammers and heavy machinery can be distinguished… as dirty brick walls rise out of the poisoned planet like sores of sorrow out of the mourner… and a flickering light of rare innocence, forlorn in this desolate place, is put out by dark sounds that well in from the karma of those that didn’t have the power to give up power…

A double-CD release of avant sounds, featuring an overwhelming 36 tracks. A buffet of styles is offered, including noise, musique concrète, click-dub, instrumental free-improv, electroacoustic sound engineering and ambient, among others. Some of the more striking tracks are Jon Vaughn’s Bouncing Ball (1 of 2) + Gravel Road, coupling static noise with menacing rhythmic overtones, and Tomas Jirku’s I Think I’m In Love, a nice minimalist dub piece. The one flare track is definitely Infoslut’s He Dreamt She Was An Atom, She Dreamt He Was Enola Gay, a radiant full-colour painting set amidst clever etchings. Opening up with some screaming distortion static, Infoslut lays in some drilling industrial strength percussion and epic synthesiser sweeps that instil a powerfully dramatic mood. All these tracks are very good explorations in sound texture and rhythmic pieces.

Le guitariste Arturo Parra a lancé il y a déjà quelque temps le disque Parr(A)cousmatique (Empreintes Digitales) où il se livre à un exercice inusité qui consiste à composer une partie de guitare sur des musiques pour bandes pouvant être écoutées de façon indépendante. Les bandes sont de Stéphane Roy, Mauricio Bejarano, Francis Dhomont, Gilles Gobeil et Robert Normandeau. On a ici le meilleur de ce que peut offrir la musique mixte: une partie électroacoustique réalisée par quelques-uns des meilleurs compositeurs du genre et une partie instrumentale composée par un virtuose qui connaît toutes les possibilités de son instrument. Du grand art.

There is a recent trend in electroacoustic music where instrumentalists with improvisational or compositional skills are collaborating with studio-based electroacoustic composers in the creation of works. Lori Freedman, Randy Raine-Reusch, and Abbie Conant are a few of names that come to mind. Another example is Colombian-Canadian guitarist Arturo Parra who collaborates on this recording with a choice group of Montréal acousmatic composers — Francis Dhomont, Stéphane Roy, Gilles Gobeil, Robert Normandeau, and from Colombia, Mauricio Bejarano.

The most successful of these collaborations in my opinion are those with Dhomont, Normandeau and Gobeil. The intense energy of Parra’s playing is well supported by those artists’ sensitive control of tension and release. They also work because the guitar and the studio parts find frequent points of intersection and dialogue. The Roy piece felt to me that the studio component was on a different plane than the guitar, although to his credit, I found the sounds Roy created to be the most original.

Cooperative efforts such as the one lead here by Parra are long overdue — the synthesis of the two encroaches on old habits and gives acousmatic music a new zest. It is nice to hear a melodic line weaving in and out of voluminous washes and thick stabs, for instance, or hearing the acousmatic component hold the main pitch interest while the guitar screeches and grinds around it. In short, a bold spark on my radar screen. I look forward to similar explorations in the years ahead instigated by Parra and others.

La soirée est chargée: plus de trois heures de musique, de quoi assouvir le plus vorace appétit. Auparavant, une courte rencontre avec le compositeur à l’honneur en ce samedi, Robert Normandeau, membre fondateur de cette manifestation Rien à voir avec Gilles Gobeil et Jean-François Denis. C’est la douzième édition de cette sorte de festival quasi bisannuel de l’acousmatique et ce dernier concert est entouré d’une aura spéciale.

Robert Normandeau y tient le haut du pavé, comme compositeur et comme interprète. «Oui, dans ce genre de métier, nous sommes vraiment des interprètes; la diffusion — certains parlent de projection, en analogie avec le cinéma — est primordiale car, pour notre forme de musique, rien n’est plus essentiel que la manière dont on met le son en espace.» Le concert s’annonce donc bien puisque, en plus, on y entendra Chorus, une œuvre pour laquelle Normandeau a remporté le premier prix au premier Concours international de musique sacrée de Fribourg. Robert Normandeau fait de la musique sacrée?

«Absolument et je vous prie de ne pas confondre avec musique religieuse», lance-t-il aussi amicalement que Messiaen avait l’art d’aborder ce sujet. «Mon œuvre se base sur le son d’une cloche, représentant le christianisme, la shofa [une sorte de gros hautbois], qui est un instrument rituel judaïque, et l’appel des muezzins, pour l’islamisme. Il ne s’agit donc pas de parler de religion, davantage de spiritualité au sens moderne et dans une perspective individuelle. J’aimerais croire que cette musique amène à une réflexion.» On en jugera plus avant, après le concert.

Formidable interprète

Entré dans la salle, Normandeau présente d’abord des pièces d’autres compositeurs qui le passionnent — et nombre d’entre elles sont des premières ici.

C’est la formule consacrée de cette série de concerts. Un premier constat s’impose: Normandeau est un formidable interprète. Plutôt que de jouer de l’à-plat des haut-parleurs devant nous pour ensuite faire «tourner» le son dans le volume de la salle, il crée presque systématiquement — c’est son style — un axe oblique qui va du côté jardin au fond de la salle qui s’oppose au côté cour. Ainsi, nous nous trouvons au centre même de l’espace sonore, dont l’entièreté est intimement ressentie. On suit alors avec un émerveillement renouvelé les pérégrinations spatiales de la musique.

On apprivoise The Unmoved Center (Randall Smith) avec joie. Surtout, on découvre cette musique de pionnier qu’est l’œuvre de Dockstader — datant de 1961 — qui s’impose comme une forte réponse au Poème Électronique de Varèse, possédant la même aspiration à l’énergie de la nouveauté.

L’Athanor, de Marc Favre, sonne plus académique; ce qui stupéfie ici, c’est la mise en sonorisation qu’en fait Normandeau, attentif à tous les détails. Puis arrive le chef-d’œuvre et l’interprétation de génie, l’un semblant fructifier l’autre et vice-versa en ce contexte: pièce la plus «longue», ce fut celle qui, imagination incroyable, séduisante et passionnée imposant l’attention fervente, parut la plus brève. Sur un rire d’enfant, de petits riens de bruits de pierres, on ne pressent rien: Normandeau nous fait pénétrer de plain-pied dans un univers magique qu’on tient absolument à retrouver ultérieurement, tant la découverte fut forte.

Un autre regard

Pour ses propres œuvres, un autre regard est nécessaire. Erinyes, issue d’une musique de scène écrite pour l’Électre de Sophocle, nous fait entrer dans le monde de l’horreur et de la souffrance. Le cri humain de douleur psychologique ou de révolte fort discernable, qu’il soit féminin ou masculin, se confronte à un monde violent de heurts. Le paratexte est important: la pièce fut créée à Belfast et les raccourcis artistiques du grand créateur glacent le sang par leur efficacité.

Chorus s’avère de la même veine. Trois éléments semblent vouloir se confondre. Cet appel à l’œcuménisme vire rapidement au drame, tout en étant entraîné dans un maelström qui amalgame et fait se choquer les idées de bases, à l’image même de la réalité. La virtuosité de l’écriture et de l’interprétation laisse pantois! On attend la création de Strin(G/D)berg avec impatience.

Pour déchanter amèrement. Sur un ostinato de quinte à vide, Normandeau joue du filtre harmonique comme un débutant s’amuse avec cet élément de la quincaillerie. Assurément, ces sons durent être efficaces lors des représentations de Mademoiselle Julie. La pseudo-œuvre tirée de ce travail théâtral, à l’opposé des deux œuvres entendues précédemment, montre un net recul de la pensée et de la curiosité technique dont pâtit l’art. En plus, la diffusion est d’un ordinaire consternant et l’imagination montre sa pauvreté dès que les modèles (le Stockhausen de Stimmung, Unsichtbarer Chöre ou Oktophonie, les passions d’Ian Moody et certaines pages «planantes» de Tavener ou harmoniquement réductrices d’Adams ou de Glass) imposent leur nette supériorité. Tous les créateurs ont leur moment d’égarement et succombent une fois à la facilité. Espérons que c’est là la situation, qu’on souhaite très passagère.

Auparavant, il y eut un concert consacré aux jeunes compositeurs. Deux noms ressortent: Félix Boisvert et Martin Messier. Plus que de belles promesses, déjà une maîtrise assedz originale de ce qu’il y a à dire et comment le dire. Le reste est en général scolaire et sans grand intérêt, sauf qu’une constatation se doit d’être respectueusement faite, qui s’adresse à tous: le haut niveau de qualité que montrent tous ces jeunes à rendre adroitement vivante dans l’espace la musique parfois gauche qu’ils tentent d’inventer.