If radio doesn’t appear, it means you haven’t installed the Flash plugin or that your version is too old. You must also activate Javascript.
The first meaning of the French word ‘figure’ is ‘the body.’ To describe its form in sound, to interpret it. Volumes, surfaces, lines and points studied for themselves. ‘Figure’ also means the human face. Like the one on the cover of this disc, like the human presence that we find all too often absent in this music. Finally, the figure is the element that stands out from the background. The figure is the significant element and the author’s signature; in the background we usually find elements that are less personal and more obvious. When I am working on a piece it is the figure that I look for, the sound or family of sounds that will characterize it in a significant way, and indelibly.
Laughing figures for Le renard et la rose. Irresistible laughter, the wild joy that we need so much and which is too often lacking in concert music. Figures of meaning in Venture, where figurative elements belong to another era and another musical genre: rock. The aims are so different, but in many other ways we are so alike. Figures of speech, in Figures de rhétorique, describe the relationship between the tape and the piano, and how the latter always moves from the foreground to the background in this music constructed from a set of instrumentalist’s materials that is recorded and transformed, or played live. Figures and grounds for Ellipse and the way it is marked by the figures the guitarist sketched from the moment of the initial studio work over the grounds made of electronic music.
As I was preparing these program notes I realized that all of the concert pieces in this recording are dedicated. What is a dedication? Surely it is a way of presenting a gift to someone whose role in the creation of the work was important; it is the artist’s way of showing gratitude for that contribution. But the dedication is also a way of projecting oneself into that person, of finding the ideal listener for each of our pieces, the listener without whom the music would have a different meaning.
I make my music as a sound writer rather than as a composer in the usual sense. The latter writes music that is meant to be played and interpreted. The composer of acousmatic music is alone in the studio and, much like the author and the painter, forms the work with the hands. The result is not only a set of codes, it is something that has been made real. The moment it emerges from the workshop it takes on life. Nothing, and no-one, can change it.
But working this way shuts the composer away in the greatest solitude imaginable, to remain there until the work is presented in concert. It seems only natural that the composer would occasionally imagine the ideal listener, an alter ego to talk to in the silence of the night, someone with whom to share not only the revelations that the act of creating affords but also the suffering that it commands. Had I not had them to dedicate these works to, none of the pieces presented here would have come into the light in their present form.
Robert Normandeau, Montréal [English translation: Tom Carter, v-99]
notice@imed_0944-0001
Reissue of IMED 9944.
Includes a CD-ROM zone: MP3 (320 kbps)