A Musical Landscape
by François Guérin
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In the film Contact by director Robert Zemeckis, Jodie Foster plays an
astronomer who is the first to detect ‘intelligent’ signals from outer space.
The series of events that follow take her from the decoding of the message to
an enigmatic encounter on the outer confines of the universe. In the last
scene of the film, her character is seen sitting alone on the edge of a
canyon, withdrawn and absorbed in her thoughts. A desert landscape stretches
out endlessly behind her under a canopy of stars that evoke all the promise
her adventure has raised. Overlaying this scene, a few notes played on the
piano barely disturb the complete silence.
This sound ‘amnesia’ may come as a surprise from a producer who, in
previous scenes involving explosions and lift-offs, has made extensive use of
an impressive array of sounds. We are drawn back to the edge of silence, as
if noise should only be used to emphasize climactic situations and must be
eradicated in all other instances. Still, instead of the piano’s sparse
melody, would not the gentle whisper of the wind, the rustling of stunted
trees, the distant haunting cry of a bird of prey, or the faint trickling of
a brook have conveyed the director’s desire to evoke our cosmic
insignificance and isolation, just as well, if not better?
It would have been interesting to have assigned the realization of the
soundtrack accompanying the final scene to Yves
Daoust. Born at the time of the inception of musique concrète and
well-versed in the techniques of sound design after his years at the National
Film Board of Canada (NFB), he would
certainly have been able to convey the entire musical and emotional scope of
the film’s epilogue simply by drawing on the immense reservoir of sounds that
surround us. Indeed, for Daoust the line between our
sound environment and music, as we usually understand it, is a porous and
malleable one. Such a border allows for unusual comings and goings which,
time and again, provide the ear with renewed pleasure.
Water Music exemplifies this approach favoured by
the composer: the release of all the musicality implicitly contained in the
sounds of our environment. This process draws on the notion that there are
two different types of auditory perception. The first is the perception of
sound, in general, as a source of information on reality which characterizes
our natural auditory reflexes vis-à-vis all sounds, especially those related
to our everyday life. The second is the more specific perception of the
æsthetic dimension of sounds as when we listen to music. These two mechanisms
are not necessarily distinct and incompatible; on the contrary, it might be
said that they complement one another during all listening-related
activities. Yves Daoust pushes this logic to the
extreme, revelling in this perceptual ambiguity with great virtuosity.
Sometimes the listener hears familiar sounds treated as if they were those of
a musical instrument, and sometimes he perceives instrumental timbres which
seem to have been metamorphosed into sounds of the environment. Thus, we are
confronted with a new vision of sounds which relentlessly calls into question
our old perceptual habits.
This approach continues in the same vein as Daoust’s earlier cycle of works for one musician and tape [the
CD Anecdotes, empreintes DIGITALes,
IMED 9106] which opposes an instrumentalist and a pre-recorded tape both on
the level of color and discourse. The contrast between instrumental
sonorities and sounds originating in the environment is striking. Again and
again, the composer challenges and probes our way of listening, which has
been conditioned entirely by an instrumental repertoire too often completely
oblivious to the implicit beauty of those coarse or sparkling sonorities not
produced by traditional instruments. Without denying the immense wealth of
the classical music tradition, Daoust repeatedly
brings together music and soundscape. In so doing, he demonstrates their
complementarity, the qualities they share and those that differentiate them.
Above all, he requires that familiar sounds too often reduced to their basic
anecdotal characteristics be heard in an æsthetic manner. By doing so he
widens the reductive boundaries of our musical landscape and our general
conception of music.
This concern for finding a common ground between the two traditionally
compartmentalized domains of music and sound environment extends to the
titles themselves, which often — paradoxically — come out of the traditional
musical heritage. Thus, we have Water Music,
Impromptu and Fantaisie, as
well as his earlier works: Quatuor,
Valse, Adagio and Suite
Baroque. But, as one expects, there is more to this approach than a
simple, ironic reference to musical terminology. In Fantaisie, for instance, Yves Daoust uses
Schubert’s famous Fantasie in
F minor, Op. 103, which inspires not only the
title but also the work’s very form. Here again, the composer provides us
with clues for listening drawn from our musical culture that enable us to
transcend a purely anecdotal understanding of the work.
Fantaisie also raises the question: is this music
or a sound documentary? Composed solely of excerpts taken from radio
programs, it offers a documentary outlook on the very medium of radio;
nevertheless, the work rigorously abides by the rules of a self-contained
musical development which is reinforced, emphasized and framed by
Schubert’s quotation. Thus, the work remains
accessible to a listening public regardless of language. Indeed to appreciate
the work an understanding of the text matters little. The selected voices,
the culled radio sequences and the chosen program excerpts were all adopted
as much for their intrinsic musical and sound quality as for their anecdotal
value. Thus, a non-francophone listener can easily follow the work’s
development and appreciate the path it suggests. Here again, soundscape (this
time of a cultural nature) and musical landscape blend harmoniously through a
masterful musical treatment of the material.
Daoust’s concern with preserving the original
figurative imprint of the sound sources he uses as his basic material is
another characteristic of the composer’s work. This sets it apart from the
trend towards disembodied sound phenomena to which the computer’s potential
all too often leads. Manipulations, although radical at times, are never
performed with the intention of expunging the sounds’ anecdotal or
referential origins. Rather, their purpose is to reveal the sounds’ full
dramatic and symbolic potency, to release their musical essence. By drawing
on our shared knowledge of such familiar sounds as those of the church bells
he brings into play in Résonances, Yves Daoust wants us to approach these sounds in the same way
that we approach all music.
Fond as he may be of natural sounds, Daoust also
amalgamates cultural landscape and traditional musical heritage into the
concept of sound environment. Impromptu illustrates
this magnificently. This time, Chopin’s work
provides both the unifying principle and the basic material for the piece. A
dissection, so to speak, of Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op.
66, recorded note-by-note and treated by means of a computer, it
resonates from beginning to end with the spirit of the romantic composer.
Manipulations set the imagination free, creating an instrument with endless
possibilities and no limitations whatsoever, such as Chopin the pianist might have conjured up only in his wildest
dreams. Here again, the referential origins of the material are not
concealed; rather, the composer turns them into the leading thematic element
of the piece.
Daoust carefully applies the process of curning
the musical landscape back on itself, of taking the musical work back to the
very origins of the material used to elaborate it in Mi
bémol. Once more our everyday experience of sounds is called upon. The
piece relentlessly challenges our appreciation of soundscape by diverting
familiar sonorities from their primary meaning and presenting them in a
coherent musical structure. The implicit experience provides a reference that
guides our understanding of the purely musical dimension of the work’s
development. Conversely, the composer suggests by the same token that our
musical experience can assume the same role. Nothing prevents us from
listening to the sound environment with a cultural and musical ear and from
adopting an æsthetic approach to listening at all times.
Ultimately, could this whole technique be said to serve no other purpose
than to enrich the ear and supply new landmarks? Or to suggest that we listen
to our soundscapes as music? That alone would be enormous. But music is also
a vehicle: it is the one we associate most naturally with our joys and
sorrows, our dreams and memories. This is what Daoust’s Il était une fois… (conte sans
paroles) calls to mind with its imaginary worlds turned into sound and
the manifold recollections that the tales recited to a child on the brink of
sleep bring to mind. This piece confirms that if music is essentially a
matter of listening, it is above all a manifestation of the reassurance we
seek from it, and of what we are left with after the passage of time.
But it is also proof that not unlike those artists of the past who in
their own fields were responsible for defining the iconography, graphic arts
and fashions of today, Yves Daoust belongs to that
rare breed of authentic composers who work the musical landscape of the
present to better prepare the soundscapes of tomorrow.
François Guérin, Montréal [x-98]
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