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[In 22 “chapters”] Includes, as chapter 21, the videomusic Un autre Printemps by video artist Robert Darroll, music by Francis Dhomont.
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To Arturo Parra
En cuerdas was realized in the composer’s studio in 1998 and premiered on 15 May 1998 at the Festival international de musique actuelle de Victoriaville (Québec). It was commissioned by Arturo Parra with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. I would like to thank Arturo Parra, whose many textures and sounds make up the materials of this piece, as well as Ina-GRM, which was kind enough to open wide the doors of the SYTER studio to me. En cuerdas won First Prize at the Hungarian Radio’s EAR’99 International Competition of Electroacoustic Music (Budapest, Hungary, 1999) and was also a prizewinner at the competition Città di Udine (Italy, 1998). En cuerdas was recorded on the 1998 disc Contemporanea ’98 (Taukay 107) and on the 2000 disc Sonic Circuits VIII (Innova 117).
Night Traffic employs the sound of cars passing back and forth on a four-lane highway, a noise that is now a familiar part of urban and suburban life, and embeds it in a musical texture that adds harmony and creates musical phrases from the random passing of the cars and their Doppler shifts. The implicit violence and aggressiveness of the traffic sounds leads to the construction of a texture that is theatrical and almost operatic.
We’ve all had the experience of tapping our forks and knives on dinnerware, noticing their pleasing sounds and feeling frustrated that we couldn’t turn them into real music.
Night Traffic, Table’s Clear and Idle Chatter Junior all explore ways to transform familiar sounds into musical sounds.
These three pieces have some interesting relations to cinema in the extent to which they encourage the listener to visually imagine the creators of the sound sources and to individually construct a kind of virtual reality that will accommodate this vision. The cars have voices, a super-human percussionist plays the dishes, and the chatterers at a cocktail party are somehow managing to make music, despite their best intentions. In other words the pieces attempt to create their own kind of inner ‘cinematic’ world. These pieces are also influenced by film’s ability to find poetry in mundane things: an urban landscape becomes a painting, disembodied voices evoke song, and so on. Finally, I am very pleased with the way that Uli Aumüller has used this music in his film. Sound and image each manage to maintain their integrity and autonomy, yet work together well.
Paul Lansky
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Table’s Clear uses these same sounds to create a kind of fantasy realization of that wish. In 1990 I set my two young sons, Jonah and Caleb, loose in the kitchen to make all the noise they could. I then used these recorded noises to explore this sound domain. Initially in the piece the noises we hear are familiar, and could easily be done in real-time at the dinner table. But, as the piece evolves these sounds become part of a super-human virtuoso texture that has some striking resemblances to Gamelan music. As the piece winds down, we wake, as if from a dream, and notice that we’re still trying awkwardly to coax music from kitchenware.
Night Traffic, Table’s Clear and Idle Chatter Junior all explore ways to transform familiar sounds into musical sounds.
These three pieces have some interesting relations to cinema in the extent to which they encourage the listener to visually imagine the creators of the sound sources and to individually construct a kind of virtual reality that will accommodate this vision. The cars have voices, a super-human percussionist plays the dishes, and the chatterers at a cocktail party are somehow managing to make music, despite their best intentions. In other words the pieces attempt to create their own kind of inner ‘cinematic’ world. These pieces are also influenced by film’s ability to find poetry in mundane things: an urban landscape becomes a painting, disembodied voices evoke song, and so on. Finally, I am very pleased with the way that Uli Aumüller has used this music in his film. Sound and image each manage to maintain their integrity and autonomy, yet work together well.
Paul Lansky
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Idle Chatter Junior is the fourth in a series of pieces that makes music from the fragmented sounds of speech. The speech is chopped up into tiny bits, tossed around and thrown out onto the sonic canvas to form a rhythmic texture against a slowly evolving harmonic background.
Night Traffic, Table’s Clear and Idle Chatter Junior all explore ways to transform familiar sounds into musical sounds.
These three pieces have some interesting relations to cinema in the extent to which they encourage the listener to visually imagine the creators of the sound sources and to individually construct a kind of virtual reality that will accommodate this vision. The cars have voices, a super-human percussionist plays the dishes, and the chatterers at a cocktail party are somehow managing to make music, despite their best intentions. In other words the pieces attempt to create their own kind of inner ‘cinematic’ world. These pieces are also influenced by film’s ability to find poetry in mundane things: an urban landscape becomes a painting, disembodied voices evoke song, and so on. Finally, I am very pleased with the way that Uli Aumüller has used this music in his film. Sound and image each manage to maintain their integrity and autonomy, yet work together well.
Paul Lansky
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