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]
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.