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edge of a canyon, withdrawn and absorbed in her thoughts.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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