Roger Doyle: Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI; Passades — Volume 1: track detail

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Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI; Passades — Volume 1
CD not in catalogue

1. Charlotte and Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI (1989) 25m00s bvhaast_0304-1.1 | 12857 |

Composer: Roger Doyle

Premiere: June 12, 1989, (Bourges, France)

“Before I left Ireland for the studios at Bourges I sampled a selection of short drum rolls and patterns in my own studio in Dublin. By playing chords of these samples on the keyboard and adding sampled pipes and trumpets I created an imaginary parade passing through the streets of Paris (Louis XVI on his way to the guillotine). The pipes melody “The Lament of Louis XVI,” a song from the period. I then asked my eleven year old son Paavo to sing this song for me. The words are: O my people what is it I’ve done / I loved truth I loved justice / Your happinness is all that mattered to me / And now you’re dragging me to my death.

I also asked the actress Olwen Fouere, who had played the part of Charlotte Corday in Peter Weiss’ “Marat/Sade” unforgettably in Dublin years earlier, to read parts of the story of Charlotte Corday - some written by herself and some compiled from Corday letters. She also experimented with her voice and sang a verse from a song of the period about Corday murdering Marat in his bath. Charlotte Corday was guillotined for this.

In Bourges I used a DMX 1000 for the electronic sounds and a vocoder for the vocal transformations (the actual sound of the voice through the vocoder was as important to me as any meaning in the text). A lot of mixing and editing followed. At the end of this composition the ghost of the revolution (in the form of a horse-drawn carriage) passes through the streets of modern Paris.”

[vii-04]

Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI was recorded at the IMEB studios and at the composer’s private studio. It premiered on June 12th, 1989 during the the Synthèse Festival in Bourges. The piece was commissioned by the Institut international de musique électroacoustique de Bourges (IMEB) to celebrate the bi-centenary of the French Revolution.

3. Passades — Volume 1 (2002-03) 49m00s bvhaast_0304-1.3 | 12858 |

Composer: Roger Doyle

Early in 2002, Concerts M in Montréal commissioned a new work from me for the “Voyages: Montréal-Dublin” festival. Working in my own studio with the creative possibilities of music software which captures sounds like a freeze-frame in video, making sound movement stop, or go forwards or backwards slowly, I composed a 12-minute piece, Passades, which was premiered at that festival in March 2002 (“Irish music - if you say so” was the newspaper headline which covered the festival).

A Passade is an equestrian term meaning to move backwards and forwards over the same space. Seeing great possibilities of exploring this technique further, I continued to work on the Passades, sketching out 2 hours of material, in mainly 2 and 3 minute sections. The process has been to try to find connections between them even as they proliferate. The result is a series of sets containing 3 or 4 related Passades each. By the Autumn of 2003, 49 minutes of them were finished (4 sets plus an Opening and Closing), although I tend to find important small connections in pieces which need time to be discovered, which greatly improve them - revising pieces several times before I think of them as being really finished. Several more versions followed on a monthly basis until the version you hear here was completed on New Year’s Day 2004.

[vii-04]

Roger Doyle: Charlotte Corday and the Lament of Louis XVI; Passades — Volume 1: track detail

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