Patrick Ascione: Polyphonie-polychrome: liner notes

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Polyphonie-polychrome
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Voice Within

by Michel Chion |imed_9522-0001|

It is Patrick Ascione who perhaps first formulated the idea, which he here presents perfectly in his own terms and with a great originality of thought, that electroacoustic music—employing magnetic tape or other supporting media—was comparable to a painting in sound. Without him, I could have never elaborated upon the notion, which is often used today, of “fixed sounds”, a notion which seems to me to characterize the essence of this genre.

But these few lines are above all meant to express my esteem and admiration for the work of a composer whose world is personal and intense. The music of Patrick Ascione possesses a unique character, which comes not from any particular outside process, but directly and authentically from within. It speaks to me like a multi-voiced expression, fantastical, haunting. At least to my ears; others may find it more abstract and plastic, and others still in a completely different way. It is due to its richness that this music is at the same time both fleeting and captivating. The present disc, Polyphonie-polychrome, which reveals in its vastness all of this world, and which offers a chance for auditors to acquaint themselves with one of the major composers of the new generation of electroacoustic composers, should truly be considered an event.

Michel Chion, Paris (France) [xi-94]


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]


Polyphonie-polychrome, the triptych

by Patrick Ascione |imed_9522-0003|

The acousmatic triptych composed for concert presentation, Polyphonie-polychrome, was produced between 1984 and ’89. The concert order of these three pieces was modified for this recording; Sur champ d’azur (In a Field of Azure) et Valeurs d’ombre (Values of the Shadow) were also adapted for this recording in January, 1994.

Patrick Ascione [vi-95]

Patrick Ascione: Polyphonie-polychrome: liner notes

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