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Radio // Anecdotes
Anecdotes
Suite Baroque: Toccata, 5m39s [excerpt]
Track 1 from Anecdotes
CD: empreintes DIGITALes (1991) IMED 9106
  • Dear Yves,
    By Denis Gougeon

    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]

  • Anecdotes, the disc
    an-ec-dote
    n. a short account of an interesting or amusing incident or event, often biographical.
    Webster, 1988

    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.

    Yves Daoust [vi-91]

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