Polyphonie-polychrome, the disc
by Patrick Ascione |imed_9522-0002|
Electroacoustic music immediately attracted me because it permitted me
access to a world of sensations and emotions which I had never before
discovered in any other form of expression. The meeting of an unknown world,
of a new language arising from behind the veil of conventions, sufficiently
abstract, sensitive and powerful that only my essential creative intentions
remain, without artifice, and such that one day I would also be permitted to
participate in its edification. The present recording represents a part of my
work to which are added several other pieces composed for concert
presentation as well as some ‘program’ works created in collaboration with
visual artists.
If the painter’s canvas makes it possible to work on colors and their
nuances, it is because it permits one quite simply to retain in the most
minute details the successive wishes of the artist, the fortunate accidents,
and by progressive approaches to establish concordances, contrasts and
oppositions of meaning, of values and of forms. All this while at the same
time conserving the actual impression of it, and without having need of an
intermediary codification between the intention and the object.
In the sound field (without necessarily speaking of music), there has long
been a lack of an equivalent approach which affords one this much freedom and
flexibility: this ‘canvas of sounds’ which today is indeed magnetic tape and
its most recent derivations…
I have always been struck by the existence of this interesting
correspondence between acousmatic art and painting, an observation which has
been distinctly decisive for my work from the beginning (Métamorphose d’un
jaune citron, 1978).
This correspondence was not necessarily decisive from the point of view of
synæsthetic relationships (which are subjective perceptions), but rather
because to compose with sounds, which presupposes their fashioning one by
one, to combine them, to erase them, to replace them, then to finish by
laying them down on tape, seemed to me very close to the manner of organizing
colors on a surface… that a common point existed which was particular to
these two disciplines, an analogous basis as indispensable to one as to the
other, and without which neither one nor the other could really exist and
develop.
This common principle of fixation is at the origin of the essential and
irreducible particularities of these two distinct mirrors of human
sensibility and thought, painting and acousmatic art.
And if there really exists a distinctiveness, and consequently, if it
offers us today this extraordinary freedom of expressivity and this new world
of meaning to discover, it is precisely to this ‘immediate-memory-aid’ that
we owe it first and foremost; to this generative working surface, at the same
time the starting point and the finishing result, because by avoiding any
mediating system and all compromise, it leads the work to an original and
primordial level.
This ultimate simplification, by one stroke, radically dissociate concrète
work from that of traditional music. It is the singular power of an art of
which we are probably still far from reaching the limits…
It is, in any case, in this spirit and by these particular convictions
that, thanks in part to the commissions from the Ina-GRM, as well as to the renewed confidence of
François Bayle, that I have been able to compose the
present triptych, the title of which seems to me to accurately describe my
work.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Jean Schwarz who produced
the master tape of this recording, as well as Christian
Zanési for his concerned (and thus precious) advise. I also wish to
thank in particular Michel Chion regarding the
concerns of the preface, François Bayle and the
Ina-GRM for having encouraged this project by their
support, and Francis Dhomont (to whom I owe more
than he will ever know!).
Patrick Ascione, Menetou-Salon
(France) [vi-94]
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