Michel Chion: Préludes à la vie: liner notes

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Préludes à la vie
CD out of print

A Concrète Musician

by Pierre Schaeffer |imed_9523-0001|

To begin with, Michel Chion is a concrète musician. The signs of a concrète art for me are now very clear. Such a musician mistrusts machines, especially electronic instruments, even if he uses them. He first of all has an ear before he has buttons to turn. He listens to the depths of natural sounds and learns from them. Finally, he has a taste for the Word.

The trait of the poet is infrequent among musicians and, beyond words and ideas, a preference for images and myths. Hear words are at work in this music, the very resource of language. Not simply words cut up into pieces according to the idiotic fashion of creating ‘sound material.’ But signifying words.

In opposition to the needy musician who searches madly for a worn-out text, Michel Chion demands that the word from time to time be the deliverer of sound. After all, sound, proposed as a parable, usually recounts a genesis, the causal engendering of phenomena. What good does it do to gape before it in frivolous compliance or resignation? How can one not break the mechanical discourse and, if needed, force it to take on a human meaning?

Pierre Schaeffer, Paris (France), October 10th, 1984 [x-84]


Preludes to Life, the disc

by Michel Chion |imed_9523-0002|

This second album on empreintes DIGITALes, as with the first one, consists of very different works which are quite separated in time: Le prisonnier du son (The Prisoner of Sound) from 1972, my first “melodrama” and my first long musical work, and the 24 préludes à la vie (24 Preludes To Life), 1990, a more formal and technical work which, I hope, is also poetic. Despite everything, these two musique concrète pieces are connected, like the two sides of a vinyl album, and their final moments form an echo.

The final words of 24 préludes à la vie sound in effect like a response to the question posed by Le prisonnier du son: “The Wall of Sound, when will we overcome it?,” the prisoner asks of the future to which the voice of Cécile Sacco responds at the end of the 24 préludes à la vie, by an affirmation of the present: “We are alive.”

Michel Chion, Paris (France) [i-95]

Michel Chion: Préludes à la vie: liner notes

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