It has been already twelve years that a certain Quatuor
(Quartet) inhabits my mind and by an inexplicable force this music makes me
move near, very near, and far, very far, inside myself. These continuous
swings touch me deeply; I am captive in your special vessel braided with
magical strings, like a celestial net thrown into a sea of sound. Like a
curious painter, you allow us to penetrate your webbed world, that you spin
around us, creating bubbles of time which we cross, as others cross mirrors,
and where everyone is free to find secret passages rich in emotion and
surprise.
Twelve years of creation later, you decided to interview… an
interview, by shattering and pulverizing it in distorting mirrors, all of
that molded into A-B-A form, but with a solitary B, troubled by solitude. The
contrast is engaging and fills me with sadness; just a word or two, a few
sounds, and we are brought back to this inevitable human condition: to be
born and to die alone. L’Entrevue (The
Interview) is a window upon intimacy—perhaps the personal voice of
Daoust, the artist?
I believe I’ve already told you this: what I like in your music is
its ability to transform reality, transposing it to unsuspected levels. You
enrich reality by adding increasingly subtle ‘layers’ of meaning.
When I listen to your music, I imagine you a Druid
(‘Electroacoustix’) simmering reality in the large Daoustian pot,
whilst overlooking the delicate mutations taking place.
Forgive me if I say too much or too little. One certainty remains: your
music carries me to other places. I thank you for allowing me to write this
to you.
Denis Gougeon, a
faithful traveler!, Montréal [vi-91]
The five pieces presented here share a common source of inspiration: the
repertoire of western classical music. Each work ‘stages’ a
particular moment of music history, using a specific instrument.
I don’t know why I constantly use elements of the musical past in my
work. Perhaps it is the nostalgia for a dying tradition which, in our current
mass media society, gradually loses its meaning, deteriorates, becomes banal
and anecdotal. (We probably hear more of Beethoven’s
music in films or on television — advertising is hungry for it! —
than in concert halls.)
It may also be by complicity with the interpreter — the performer of
that tradition — who is increasingly marginalized in our world of
rapidly changing images and values. What strange behavior — in effect,
condemning to solitude; what a strange displacement with today’s
reality, to dedicate one’s life to the search of higher levels of
refinement, to master one’s art which is becoming more difficult to
communicate, less readable.
But this may be the only freedom that we have left…
Four of the works presented here form a series: four works for solo
performer and tape, on the theme of solitude, realized from recuperated
fragments of the repertoire, of its harmony, of each instrument’s
idiosyncrasies. A suite of tableaux, of sound dramas, featuring the performer
interpreting his or her own role.
From Petite
musique sentimentale (Little Sentimental Music, 1984) to L’Entrevue (The
Interview, 1991), there is a progression by which we penetrate deeper into
the intimacy of the performer, for whom the work was composed. The same theme
remains: solitude, but always explored in a new light, through the anecdotal
universe of each instrument, of each musician.