Yan Muckle, Jean Piché: Yo soy la desintegración: track detail

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Yo soy la desintegración
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Yo soy la desintegración (1997) 58m18s ambc_7109-1.1 | 12444 |

Introduction; L’enfance [Childhood]; L’accident [The Accident]; Aujourd’hui dure toujours [Today Lasts Forever]; Mon sang [My Blood]; L’amour [Love]; Dans l’ombre [In Shadow]; L’enfant et la mort [The Child and Death]; Les ailes brisées [Broken Wings]

soprano, and tape

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

Pauline Vaillancourt, soprano

Premiere: September 9, 1997, Espace GO (Montréal, Québec)

Pauline Vaillancourt, artistic director of Chants libres:

Yo soy...

I discovered the world of Frida Kahlo not through her impressive paintings (paintings marked by a suffering that could not stop her from living an extraordinary life, as the works she left us attest) but rather through the intimate Journal she kept towards the end of her life. In her texts we discover her heart, her perception and her soul.

This woman’s strange destiny led me to think about the influence that misfortune can have on course of a life, of what happens to children scarred by war, stupidity, deformity or cruelty. The world of Frida Kahlo guided me to this adaptation.

The music of Jean Piché, and the libretto by Yan Muckle will, I hope, transport you into the very special world of a child turned adult in which a very harsh destiny must be suffered and who, like Frida, makes a unique journey through life, one marked by tenacity and courage.

Jean Piché, composer:

When Pauline Vaillancourt asked me to write this music I was initially hesitant for a number of reasons. Lack of experience was one of them. In almost 25 years of work I had never written for voice. Until that day, opera had been inexplicably foreign to me. I approached the project cautiously. Kahlo primarily strikes me as a public and political figure with an outrageously artistic imagination. The explicit images she left us are like so many doors into her feverish mind, where the tightening vise of physical and emotional suffering defines both form and emotion. I found in her poetic and anecdotal writings an abiding will, the irrepressible courage to exist and an extraordinary devotion to an artistic vision in spite of the enormous physical demands it made on her. Pauline Vaillancourt’s dramatic rendering of her diaries brought this into sharp focus. On new ground for the first time, I wanted to write straightforward music that held nothing back: music that above all would sing, not scream, of sufferings assumed but pointless. I am ignorant of this kind of suffering. I have no experience of it and I have not attempted to represent it.

My music is electroacoustic. In contrast, or perhaps as a complement, to a pure approach, my compositions often contain referents to harmonic pitches and coded melodic material. This is an approach that in its technological exploration searches for means of transparent dramatic expression. I have always found the “truth” of acoustic relationships seductive. But musically this is a difficult proposition; it is a pernicious but determined peddler of raw emotion, a direct passage to the musical “thing.” In dissidence, I carry on the quest for this ever elusive musical truth.

(Note: Excerpts from Récitations by Georges Aperghis, performed by Pauline Vaillancourt, as well as traditional indigenous songs from Reunion Island, totalling fifteen seconds in length, have been used in the development of Scene 8. The vocal material on the tape has been derived from spectral manipulations of Pauline Vaillancourt’s voice as well as from pure vocal synthesis.)

About Frida Kahlo (1907-1954): “A bomb wrapped up with a ribbon” was how André Breton described the Mexican painter upon meeting her. When, at eighteen, she was the victim of a bus accident that would affect the rest of her life, Frida Kahlo had no other choice than to draw her energy from the very source of her debility. Just as the relentlessly frank lucidity of her self-portraits still has the power to shock, the vicissitudes of her life still fascinate. Her imposed marriage to pain, her love for the painter Diego Rivera and a life of torment with him, her membership in the Communist Party and her involvement in the artistic life of her age—all of these are fairly well known. In the last ten years of her life she kept a diary in which she recorded pictorial notes, her thoughts and memories. Recently published in facsimile, the Journal provides the underlying core of Yo soy la desintegración. Even though many of the events that gave her life its form can be recognized in this work, this is not the life story of Frida Kahlo. Biographical material has been distilled in the hope that from this life only the ‘secret heart,’ open and exposed, will remain.

[viii-99]

1. Introduction (1997) 1m25s ambc_7109-1.1.1 | 12445 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

2. L’enfance (1997) 5m46s ambc_7109-1.1.2 | 12446 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) A woman rambles through the mansion of her memory and revisits her childhood.

3. L’accident (1997) 2m56s ambc_7109-1.1.3 | 12447 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) Smashing, tearing, dismemberment: the young girl’s world is shattered by infinite suffering. All that was is no more. All that is not pain is lost, cancelled out.

4. Aujourd’hui dure toujours (1997) 8m24s ambc_7109-1.1.4 | 12448 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) Little by little the destroyed body, impatient to return to life, begins to move. The woman pulls herself along the ground with enormous effort towards what will be her new skin: a shackles dress.

5. Mon sang (1997) 5m26s ambc_7109-1.1.5 | 12449 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) The woman arises. She rediscovers a part of her femininity, and regains movement and the world around her. The desire to live is so great… But for the moment mirrors only reflect one image—her own.

6. L’amour (1997) 6m47s ambc_7109-1.1.6 | 12450 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) A dazzling and strange encounter with the loved one. Love finally finds an object, and the woman what she has always sought: from now on the man will be everywhere. Strident nuptials blend a hymn to love and an erotic dance, and everything seems possible.

7. Dans l’ombre (1997) 7m08s ambc_7109-1.1.7 | 12451 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) A slow march through the kingdom of the man, who though absent is still present in the heart. The woman knows that she has been deceived, but nevertheless dances, talks to the lover and tries to be with him again.

8. L’enfant et la mort (1997) 12m17s ambc_7109-1.1.8 | 12452 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) Death comes brutally and bloodily in the form of an aborted child. The dreams are over, the body useless, the spirit without peace. The woman is once again faced with solitude and the pain of her mutilated body.

9. Les ailes brisées (1997) 8m07s ambc_7109-1.1.9 | 12453 |

Composer: Jean Piché

Writer: Yan Muckle

(synopsis) The wings are clipped, the feet bound: can the heart still manage to escape? The body, worn out, bloodless, finally gives in. All that is left of the woman is the strange force that still inspires her. But the ever-present desire is dogged by an ever-growing weariness, and the end has come.

Yan Muckle, Jean Piché: Yo soy la desintegración: track detail

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Prices are in Canadian dollars — 1.00 CA$ ~ 0.99 US$ ~ 0.62 € ~ 0.50 £ ~ 1.3 AU$ ~ 105.40 ¥ — and include handling, shipping and applicable taxes.


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