Serge Arcuri: Les méandres du rêve: critiques

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Les méandres du rêve

Serge Arcuri

Les méandres du rêve

[Dream’s Meanders]

empreintes DIGITALes | IMED 9310 | 1993

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Review

par François Couture in All-Music Guide (ÉU), 1 août 2001 |408|

«Les méandres du rêve is not your average tape music album…»

Serge Arcuri’s Les méandres du rêve is an untypical release for the musique concrète label empreintes DIGITALes. Although the composer works with concrete sounds and creates tape music, his approach also includes lots of recorded keyboard parts and performed instruments. The resulting music belongs as much to mixed electroacoustics music as to new-age instrumental music. The first five pieces on this CD form a cycle, Les méandres du rêve (“Dream’s Meanders”), the musical part of a creation which also included choreography and scenography. After a short prelude, the listener dives head first into Arcuri’s dreamy world. La porte des sables, based on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel The Sand Child, includes electroacoustic sounds, oboe, English horn, and MIDI percussion. References to Arabic sonorities turn this piece into something a lot more evocative (and engaging) than what could be expected. If Murmure comes closer to a standard tape piece, Errances (for tape, oboe and harp) and Lueurs (for tape, French horn and percussion) cross over many genres, from 20th century classical to synthesizer music, both of them beautiful musical dreams. To complete the program, Arcuri added Résurgence and Chronaxie (for tape and percussion), two earlier pieces. The first one is a traditional tape piece without any distinctive qualities, while the second consists of his first experience in mixed composition. Percussionist Trevor Tureski appears on a total of three tracks, but even when he does not contribute the music remains very rhythmical. Les méandres du rêve is not your average tape music album and will appeal more to synthesizer-based instrumental music lovers than musique concrète purists.


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Review

par François Couture in All-Music Guide (ÉU), 27 avril 2001 |391_23|

Serge Arcuri’s Les méandres du rêve is an untypical release for the musique concrète label empreintes DIGITALes. Although the composer works with concrete sounds and creates tape music, his approach also includes lots of recorded keyboard parts and performed instruments. The resulting music belongs as much to mixed electroacoustics music as to new-age instrumental music. The first five pieces on this CD form a cycle, Les Méandres du rêve (Dream’s Meanders), the musical part of a creation which also included choreography and scenography. After a short prelude, the listener dives head first into Arcuri’s dreamy world. La porte des sables, based on Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel The Sand Child, includes electroacoustic sounds, oboe, English horn, and MIDI percussion. References to Arabic sonorities turn this piece into something a lot more evocative (and engaging) than what could be expected. If Murmure comes closer to a standard tape piece, Errances (for tape, oboe and harp) and Lueurs (for tape, French horn and percussion) cross over many genres, from 20th century classical to synthesizer music, both of them beautiful musical dreams. To complete the program, Arcuri added Résurgence and Chronaxie for tape and percussion), two earlier pieces. The first one is a traditional tape piece without any distinctive qualities, while the second consists of his first experience in mixed composition. Percussionist Trevor Tureski appears on a total of three tracks, but even when he does not contribute the music remains very rhythmical. Les méandres du rêve is not your average tape music album and will appeal more to synthesizer-based instrumental music lovers than musique concrète purists.


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Critique

par Philippe Tétreau in Guide ressources (Québec), 1 septembre 1999 |316|

«… l’occasion de plonger dans des climats insolites mais fertiles en sensations.»

L’électroacoustique conçue par Serge Arcuri se laisse aisément apprivoiser. Nous avons là l’occasion de plonger dans des climats insolites mais fertiles en sensations. Les séquences réunies sur ce disque contiennent quantité d’images sonores que l’on croirait tirées de films portant sur les grandes régions désertiques. D’ailleurs, Arcuri a signé la trame musicale de documentaires et de films (dont Liste noire). Différents instruments (hautbois, cor anglais, harpe, cor français, percussions) soliloquent sur la trame des sons ambiants.


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Critique

par Stephan Dunkelman in Les Cahiers de l’ACME #170 (Belgique), 1 février 1996 |907|


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Critique

par Denis Dion in CEC, Contact! #8:2 (Canada), 1 mars 1995 |186_5|

«… un compositeur en pleine possession de ses moyens.»

La maison empreintes DIGITALes nous propose un tout nouveau produit signé Serge Arcuri. Sous le titre Les méandres du rêve le compositeur montréalais nous présente une sélection intéressante regroupant sept titres extrait de son catalogue déjà fort imposant. Le titre de l’album est pour le moins représentatif des sélections présentes. Nous retrouvons un alliage savoureux d’œuvres écrites pour bande ainsi que de l’exploration de l’univers électroacoustique de type mixte. Prélude aux méandres (1985), La porte des sables (1989) pour hautbois (également Cor anglais) percussion MIDI et bande, Murmure (1989), Errances (1992) pour hautbois d’amour, harpe et bande, Lueurs (1987) pour cor percussion et bande, Résurgence (1982) et Chronaxie (1984) pour percussions multiple et bande.

Il y a chez Arcuri un sens inné de la poésie sonore. Le parcours musical est souvent amorcé de manière délicate et subtile proposant à l’auditeur une écoute riche en découvertes. Nous avons ici (en ce disque) un échantillon important du travail d’un compositeur en pleine possession de ses moyens. L’aventure musicale or, son parcours, n’est jamais abandonné au passage au bénéfice d’une démonstration banale d’une technologie utilisée.

En d’autres termes… de la musique avant toute chose!!!

Je ne saurais passé sous silence la complicité des musiciens présents… Lawrence Cherney aux parties de hautbois, hautbois d’amour et de Cor anglais, Trevor Tureski aux percussions et percussion MIDI, Erica Goodman à la harpe ainsi que l’excellent Francis Ouellet à la partie de cor. Nous écoutons ici quatre grands musiciens desquels nous découvrons une forte complicité dans ces alliages d’instruments et de bande. Il y a dans ce type d’écriture une recherche de l’intégration de l’instrument et de l’univers sonore de l’électroacoustique… fort bien comprise par l’ensemble des musiciens. À l’audition il n’y a pas lueur de conflit, lutte ou combat d’un univers vers l’autre mais un respect de la nature instrumentale souhaitant faire ressortir ses qualités propres. Le jumelage est fort bien réussi et il en découle de la sonorité globale un plaisir d’écoute.

Ce disque s’inscrit dans la politique de production de la maison empreintes DIGITALes ou chaque produit est avant tout affaire de qualité non de quantité. Bravo à toute l’équipe!


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Review

par Christopher Elson in Paris Transatlantic #5 (France), 1 mai 1994 |173_4|

Serge Arcuri, a former student of Gilles Tremblay (see PNMR No. 2, Présences francophones), is one of Canada’s leading electroacoustic composers. This disc, true to its word, meanders a wee bit, but leaves the listener with a positive picture of Arcuri’s work. The electronic component is cutting, at times externally-oriented, referential, at others inward and self-defining — we hear for example, shimmering streets of static, and the fall of electronic rain — but also pick out more mysterious psychic groans, the grinding of deep structures like tectonic plates or a lake freezing in the night. The perfomances by some of the finest interpreters of new music (Cherney, Ouellet, Tureski, Goodman) are seamlessly integrated with the electronic materials. Lueurs is rather conventional but is so recognizably of Montréal that one half expects Uzeb’s guitarist Michel Cusson to cut in with a solo.


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Mr. Sandman

par Andrew Jones in Montreal Mirror #9:29 (Québec), 16 décembre 1993 |168|

SONGWRITERS LOVINGLY CALL their dreams muses — a vocabulary to translate the compositional process. Hip artists, such as Brian Eno and Suzanne Vega, have gone so far as to say they have even heard entire songs handed down to them while they slept.

Dreams have long fascinated composer Serge Arcuri. Yet he could never quite bring their surreal, unearthly power to the stage with orchesiral instruments that were hundreds of years old. “Dreams, like myths, express themselves in a symbolic language, communication both obscure and universal,” Arcuri writes in the liner notes to his debut CD for empreintes DIGITALes, Les Méandres du rêve. “At the heart of the night, brandished against this apparent death that is sleep, the dream world is more a product of senses and seduction than one of speech.”

The breakthrough for the 39-year-old native of Beauharnois was hearing electroacoustic music. This oft-misunderstood branch ofthe musical tree was born in 1949 when Pierre Schaeffer started using a tape recorder to bulk erase the musical past and record over it the music of the future, “musique concrète.” Forged and sculpted in the multi-track recording studio with both live and synthetic sound sources, electroacoustic music has always been headphone fodder, music for our personal headspace. Like dreams, electroacoustic music offers a hot-wired short cut to the subconscious, the topology of sounds triggering something different in every listener, a soundtrack to films and visuals limited only by our imaginations.

“I like the ease with which electroacoustic music can transport yourself into many different acoustic surroundings,” says Arcuri. “That’s much more diffcult to do in a concert hall. But on the other hand, I don’t like excluding instruments. I like to have a mix of electroacoustics and live instruments, so the work is somewhere between reality of the concert stage and the ‘inouïe’.”

Arcuri studied with Yves Daoust at Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal, and has an impressive list of commissioned works to his name from the SMCQ, ACREQ, CBC and The Vancouver New Music Society. It’s not difficult to understand why: Arcuri’s work avoids the studied aridity of most “musique concrète.” It’s dazzling, texturally ravishing, and propulsive, recalling the recent pop-oriented work of John Adams on Hoodoo Zephyr — only minus the minimalist pulse.

Les Méandres du rêve (Dreams’ Meanders) was a long-term project begun in 1982 with Arcuri’s first electroacoustic piece Errances. Arcuri tried to keep a diary of dreams and incorporate them into the pieces as they were written, but found his dreams weren’t up to the quality of the project, so he decided to stick to themes rather than specifics. Indeed, most of the pieces here work on a visceral rather than literal level. Murmure, for example, revisits tribal myths about the origins of life and the big bang through processed and sampled breath sounds.

La Porte des Sables, for oboe, English horn, MIDI percussion and tape, is inspired by the fables of Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel The Sand Child. The music, while bereft of the quarter tones that permeate most Arabic music, evokes the serene, still mood of the desert through the arabesques of the horn playing. “Reading Jalloun opened my ears,” says Arcuri. “The idea of each door leading you deeper into myth, deeper into the unconscious.”

Arcuri has had the good fortune to work with intuitive and passionate soloists such as oboist Lawrence Cherney, harpist Erica Goodman, French homplayer Francis Ouellet and percussionist Trevor Tureski. “More and more instrumentalists are interested in working with electroacoustics,” Arcuri explains. “After all, these pieces were written to be included in someone’s repertory and to be easily played. I like to have open rhythm sections for the player to roam. I don’t like to be a metronome.”


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Une fournée de parutions québécoises

par Carol Bergeron in Le Devoir (Québec), 23 janvier 1993 |147_5|

La jeune musique

Plus modestement, puisqu’elle occupe un créneau sûrement moins rentable, celui de l’électroacoustique, la maison Diffusion i MéDIA propose trois enregistrements: des musiques du Montréalais Serge Arcuri (IMED 9310) et Tao (une œuvre en cinq parties) de la Belge Annette Vande Gorne (IMED 9311). Dans la collection SONARt qui a donné, avant Noël, Ne blâmez jamais les bédouins, un théâtre musical d’Alain Thibault (IMSO 9202), s’ajoute Corazón Road, carnet de voyage sonore des Français Carole Rieussec et Jean-Christophe Camps (IMSO 9301).


autres textes dans

  • Circuit #5:2 (Québec), 1 juin 1994
    «… excelle dans l’art de créer des atmosphères.»

Serge Arcuri: Les méandres du rêve: critiques

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