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.