| Forecasted
description of the project in April 2000 -
page 6/7 |
04/2000 |
Apendix 2
The Cycle of Les Âges
"Des Orages will
be the fourth and last piece of the cycle of Les Âges, a
series of works for soloist instrument and recorded electronics
that I begun at the end of 1998. Three pieces exist to this day:
- Des Rivages,
for clarinet and recorded electronics;
- Des Visages,
for alto and recorded electronics;
- Des Mirages,
for piano and recorded electronics.
This third piece has been
written and created during the seminary of composition at the
Bartok Festival, in Szombathely (Hungary), under the direction
of Michael Jarrell and Marco Stroppa. It has particularly
benefited from the advice of these two composers. Many elements
of the composition have been determined by the fact that the
piece has been written for a particular interpreter, the
Hungarian pianist Judit Vargá.
In each of the pieces of the
cycle of the Âges, I try to set together two
heterogeneous elements:
- an instrumental line that
is in the order of the "pure music", that is to
say abstract;
- a recorded part which, on
the contrary, is the most possible evocative of concrete natural
phenomenon: the noise of the sea is easily recognisable in Des
Rivages, and so is the fire in Des Visages (Des
Mirages is more ambiguous).
To the thread of the cycle,
implemented means have evolved to a growing instrumentality. At
the beginning, I simply used recordings taken from nature; a
part of the sounds that fills the acoustic space of Des
Rivages has been recorded at the edge of the ocean. In a
second step, I have employed the electronics to manufacture my
sounds and the noise of the fire in Des Visages is a
purely electronic creation ex nihilo. In Des Mirages,
I have definitively crossed the cape and compound the electronic
part from a recording of the soloist part totally transformed
with the help of the computer: Des Mirages, from the
debut to the end, is nearly a unique sound of piano. Making this,
I have lost the evocative character that was present in the
first two pieces.
To find it in Des Orages,
I envisage this time, a step that is like a scientific method;
to understand and master the natural phenomenon that is the
storm. I do not intend to use a reproduction (a banal
recording), but a synthesis - analysis, comprehension,
reconstruction - that will be, of course, be musical to
reconstruct the sound and the progress of a storm, without
starting from a storm itself.
For this reason I wish now to
use the sounds that are from instruments of music (therefore,
that one can write), but at the same time imitate, or
figure, in a very realistic manner, the sounds of nature. This
invention of the XVIIIth century - that I find
particularly ingenious - is necessary to solve a contemporary
problem, the one of the expressiveness of a language whose rules
are, most of the time, coded, non figurative, and therefore,
purely, in a word, musical."
Rémy-Michel Trotier
April 2000
Apendix 3
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