Yves Daoust: Musiques naïves (CD): liner notes

electroradio

Musiques naïves

Yves Daoust

Musiques naïves

empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 9843 | 1998

CD 25.00 CA$

to add to your cart, click the price (price always includes handling + air mail shipping)

A Musical Landscape

by François Guérin |imed_9843-0001|

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 In the last scene of the film, her character is seen sitting alone on the edge of a canyon, withdrawn and absorbed in her thoughts.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]

Yves Daoust: Musiques naïves (CD): liner notes

Prices are in Canadian dollars — 1.00 CA$ ~ 0.98 US$ ~ 0.71 € ~ 0.65 £ ~ 88.83 ¥ ~ 1.7 AU$ ~ 5.31 DKK ~ 5.72 NOK ~ 6.92 SEK — and include handling, shipping and applicable taxes.


news  |  shop  |  artists  |  works  |  radio  |  links  |  about  |  etc.  |  how to order  |  français

Page cat@imed_9843.notices generated in Montréal by litk 0.560 on Saturday, March 13, 2010
Development & maintenance: DIM.

Suggestions box

Got an idea? A comment? Found an error or a bug on this page? Let us know!

Email:

Ideas, comments, errors, bugs:

Mailing list

Type in your email address to subscribe to our mailing list and stay up to date!