La Rochefoucault said that certain people would
never have known love if they had not been told about it. By extension, we
may say that certain sonic landscapes, thought colors, certain states and
manifestations of the soul would remain forever muted, if electroacoustics
had not sprung forth from nowhere — unexpected and inevitable.
When the time has come to write our century’s music history, and the
endless fights have died for lack of combatants, this expanse of sonic
universe will take its rightful place. But, at this point in time, where is
this new language? To be a language, one needs a vocabulary, a syntax, and a
grammar; the joy and the pain of electroacoustics is that every work demands
the invention of its own language, otherwise, without meaning to, it falters
as imitation. And at this point we haven’t even spoken of style! Each
explorer of this acoustical forest must leave a trail to guide the listener,
without for a moment destroying the magic.
And this is where Normandeau is. He never leads
the listener into a sonorific labyrinth of which he himself is not master and
experienced traveler. The idea of ‘listenability,’ so often missing in the
past 50 years, returns in force with him without surcoming to facility or the
mundane. He speaks his own ideas with his own voice — each work distinct,
while clearly members of the same family.
Like a place never before imagined, like an untouched territory yet to be
explored by human ears, like an unheard-of soundscape. It is fair enough to
think of ourselves as explorers driven by absolute necessity or some
ineluctable task. But this should not overshadow the essential which is still
found in the idea of communicating something, of being carriers of meaning
and sounds.
But who communicates what, and to whom? A serious dilemma for seasoned
thinkers who are still pondering and extracting its substantial core. Is it
not in this notion of unheard-of that we find, up to a certain point, the
principle interest of this new sound-art called acousmatics? But what is so
unheard-of that anyone can pretend to possess its key, or at least a
password? The unheard-of quality probably resides less in the novelty — which
is within reach of everyone today — than in the liberation of interior
spaces. In other words, it is not only the sound itself which interests me —
sound is always more easily created and more and more present — for excluding
other aspects would be banal. It is in the meeting of sound within oneself
that it holds significance as a ritual. What is this strange feeling that
arises in me when I listen to works by Bayle,
Calon, Dhomont or
Parmegiani? One thing can be said: this music helps
me to live by revealing unexplored territories which open up places of
contemplation and meditation within me.
What can I say about my work? Do I have the presumptuousness to say that I
possess the key to the unheard-of garden while so many others have tried yet
the gateway remains locked? Of course, I would not go that far; however,
since this issue should be addressed, it is probably with the intent of not
adding noise to the general rumble that one can see in my intentions a
certain noble gesture. Indeed, the works presented here — one excepted,
La chambre blanche not yet available on disc — are the
only ones I have chosen to present publicly after more than ten years of
full-time work. We offer them to you with humility, as well as with great
pleasure, and the we is truly plural since without the generous support of
Jean-François Denis and Claude
Schryer, who have decided against all odds to embark upon this
adventure, this disc might not have materialized for a long time.
Robert Normandeau, Montréal
[ii-90]
electrocd.com
Robert Normandeau: Lieux inouïs (CD): liner notes