Asymmetry Music Magazine » Francis Dhomont

Cycle du son, en quatre volets

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:51:31 +0000

One cannot help remark something very interesting about Dhomont’s recorded oeuvre, and that is that it is full of pieces appearing as parts of other pieces. Novars, the first piece of Les dérives du signe, appears here as the third piece of Cycle du son. The third volet, I should say. Chiaroscuro, the second piece of Les dérives, has also appeared by itself, as Chiaroscuro… ou les jeux de l’ambiguité. And Météores is also the third, and culminating, piece of Chroniques de la lumière.

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Read the rest of Cycle du son, en quatre volets (216 words)

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Jalons

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:49:15 +0000

Jalons is that rare disc in Dhomont’s output that is not a cycle or part of one. It is simply, as the title (of the disc only) indicates, a collection of pieces spanning a portion of Dhomont’s career, the portion from 1985 to 2001. It is, as Dhomont says, a “mini-panorama.” And though the span of years is small, musically this is as diverse a collection as one could wish for.

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Read the rest of Jalons (226 words)

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Mouvances-Métaphores

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:47:49 +0000

The title Mouvances-Métaphores covers two discs of music: Cycle de l’errance and Les Dérives du signe, seven pieces from the eighties all related by ideas of movement and change. (The word Métaphores is as literal, and as metaphorical, in French as it is in English. And both meanings are important for these pieces.)

The first piece of Cycle de l’errance, Points de Fuite, is a curious and curiously teasing sort of piece. First of all, while its points may indeed be said to vanish, as is true for any piece of music, it also provides material for the next two pieces of the cycle, giving it a literal kind of permanence at odds with its title. Second, it is inside a larger piece, Cycle de l’errance, which is itself inside of Mouvance-Métaphores, titles which might seem to account for those three rather odd little interruptions in its twelve minute span, first a passing car, next a train whistle, and last a jet plane. Seem to, but not really. (...)
Read the rest of Mouvances-Métaphores (578 words)

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Frankenstein symphony

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:32:42 +0000

Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dhomont’s symphony is made up of bits and pieces. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s monster, Dhomont’s symphony has a life of its own.

Unlike the monster, however, Dhomont’s symphony is graceful and lovely, all of its bits were used with the victims’ permission, and the surgery performed has left the pieces of which it has been made alive and well.

Nothing of Shelley’s story is presented here. The title refers solely to the surgical technique, although appropriately enough two of the pieces appropriated were Les corps éblouis (Christian Calon) and Spleen (Robert Normandeau).

Sewn together in 1997, the Frankenstein Symphony is in four movements: Allegro, Andante, Scherzo (Giocoso), and Finale.

The clip is from the opening of the Allegro. If you’re interested in the corpus from which this was taken, Gilles Gobeil’s Le vertige inconnu, there’s a clip at the electrocd site.

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Also, here’s a clip from Normandeau’s Spleen:

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…et autre utopies

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:32:36 +0000

The album …et autres utopies, which was released for Dhomont’s 80th birthday, contains all recent work—either new pieces or older ones reworked. Four of the five pieces on this disc—all but Voyage-miroir—were performed at the Akousma(3) festival on the day itself, 2 November 2006.

Here and There, which opened the concert, also opens this disc. “Here and There” is one of those laconically descriptive titles that manages to be accurate and uninformative at one and the same time. The music does explore how music exists in both space and time. And the materials are from here and there as well—watery sounds (modified to be hard-edged), a girl’s voice, footsteps, and so forth. But none of that really captures the restless and mercurial qualities of this fascinating piece. I guess only listening to it will do. [Jean-François Denis requested that we link to the electrocd site for their clips.] (...)
Read the rest of …et autre utopies (405 words)

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Sous le regard d’un soleil soir

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 05:30:14 +0000

Sous le regard d’un soleil soir is an electroacoustic melodrama, the first of Cycle des Profondeurs, which, along with Forêt profonde and the soon to be completed La cri du Choucas, takes its text from psychiatric writings, in this case the famous Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. The ideas that have inspired each piece of this cycle are not only part of the piece but have been transmuted into musical ideas.

In Sous le regard d’un soleil soir, this is clearest in the kind of layering so easy and natural to tape music—any sound can be played simultaneously with any other sound; any sound can be played against itself, lined up exactly or offset. One voice can be saying various different things on several different tracks at once. This is most humorously—but seriously—done where a man says “I’m an individual” and “I’m an in divide you all” and also “I’m no one” and “I’m a no un.” This is followed by another man saying something about one’s inner self losing its identity and integrity, which is an uncomfortable thing to happen to a person, but a pleasant and positive thing to happen to a sound.

And so on. And as the “characters” talk about the real and the unreal, the outside and the inside, one finds oneself listening ever more carefully to the sounds of this piece, to the natural and artificial, to the strictly musical and to the voices talking—and ultimately unable, as it should be, to distinguish them in those ways.

Listen here to clips.

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Forêt profonde

michaelkarman — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:58:21 +0000

Forêt profonde continues the multiple and shifting meanings of Sous le regard d’un soleil soir, here using fairy tales and the writings on fairy tales of Bruno Bettleheim and even, in a one place, some text about Bettleheim and his incarceration in a prison camp. Profonde means deep physically—as in the place in the forest one is always warned in fairy tales not to go–as well as psychologically or philosophically, as in profound.

Everything about Forêt profonde is multiple, and shifting. The texts are in seven different languages, with the some expressions, like “Once upon a time,” given not only in different languages but in different forms in the same language (as in “Il était une fois” and “Il y a de cela mille ans ou plus”). And, of course, the music is, like fairy tales, alternately comforting and menacing.

I suppose one can say that, anyway. It all seems to me, just listening, to be profoundly beautiful and nothing else!

Clips here.

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