Asymmetry Music Magazine » Michele Bokanowski

Pour un pianiste

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:39:47 +0000

Although just recently released, the music on this disc dates from 1974. Fortunately, it sounds as fresh as if it had been written yesterday. I’ve heard many pieces from the sixties and seventies with instrument and electronics that I don’t like—pieces in which the instrument (often piano) plays the spiky, quasi-serial sounding stuff that’s been (unfairly) labelled “academic,” but which is really just tedious. Pour un pianiste is quite definitely not one of those pieces. For 1974, it’s really quite remarkably unique in its treatment of the piano. For one, there’s none of the ordinary piano sounds mixed with slightly treated piano sounds. Or ordinary piano sounds mixed with other ordinary piano sounds for that matter. Without ever sounding like any thing but a piano, this piece never sounds like any piano on earth. While requiring virtuoso playing from M. Frémy, on both prepared and unprepared pianos, the piece never sounds showy. It’s all solid, good music. I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a nice tame piece, though. It’s not. It’s a wild, harsh, sharp-edged beauty that will thrill no matter how often you play it.

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Trois Chambres d’Inquietude

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:39:15 +0000

I’ve read some reviews of Trois Chambres d’Inquietude which emphasize its dark, unsettling qualities. If you want to read about that aspect of things, you can go to http://www.electrocd.com/cat.e/eeaoa_07.prs.html to read a couple of these, which also emphasize the looping techniques so dear to the hearts of so many concrète composers. (Bokanowski is easily the most inventive looper I know. I’ve never felt in any of her pieces that I’m being treated to compositional laziness, but that’s probably because she’s more interested in the layering (and phasing) possibilities that loops give you rather than in simple cantus firmus.)

While I appreciate all the things other reviewers have mentioned, I must say that when I listen to this piece, I am most taken with all the watery sounds, mostly bright echoey dripping sounds. (When I play this at home, in my living room, there’s a trick of acoustics that makes one of the softer percussive drips in chambre deux sound as if it were coming out of my bedroom.)

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L’Ange

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:38:42 +0000

Michèle Bokanowski has written music for many of her husband’s films, indeed, her current project is the soundtrack for his next film. The only film music she’s allowed to appear alone on disc, however, is the music for L’Ange. Written only a couple of years after Pour un pianiste, L’Ange shows how naturally Bokanowski’s musical ideas, as heard in the earlier work, a concert piece, sound just as good when applied to film. Of course, it may be that all her music is “cinematic,” and it certainly doesn’t hurt that Patrick Bokanowski makes the kinds of films he makes, with lots of abstract images and non-sequiturs, and narrative only for small, isolated bits—very like tape music. And while I would agree with Michèle that the music for L’Ange can stand alone—she only agreed to release the music if it were simply the soundtrack, played straight through—I hope that everyone who buys this disc will also want to see the film, too. It’s a stunner. Plus, you’ll want to hear how different the music sounds alone from how it sounds with the film. It’s quite remarkable how, for instance, an obsessive pattern that accompanies an obsessive sequence in the film can sound even more obsessive played alone. (And if “obsessive” seems negative to you, just substitute the word “energetic,” then, to get the idea.)

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Tabou

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:37:45 +0000

The first of Metamkine’s three inch Cinéma pour l’oreille cds was this jewel. Tabou starts with some lovely glops of sound that lead into a stuttery motif made from voices (including Bokanowski’s) at a party. A single soft note on the electric organ eventually provides the first pitch of a little figure that weaves in and out of the glops and the stuttery motif for the rest of the piece. This is a gross oversimplification, but to detail all the intricate details would take longer to retail than the piece takes to play. (The startlingly different sound world that eventually takes over the piece at the end is worth the price of admission all on its own.) Tabou is one of those cds that will be constantly in your machine, I’d guess.

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Cirque

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:36:56 +0000

Cirque consists of five named movements, Allegro in three parts, Andante, Scherzo, Galop, and Finale (Parade). The Allegro is the longest of the five and sets forth the musical materials for the whole piece: galloping hooves, laughter (kids and adults), crowd and circus sounds (other than laughing and hooves, things like cheering and cymbal crashes. Allegro also establishes the loop as the principal principle of presentation. The Andante opens with low, rumbling sound—through that emerges first the hoofbeats (softer, muted) and some dark judderings on the accordion (played by Jean-Louise Matigner). The Scherzo, as one might expect, consists largely of laugh loops. What one might not have expected is the honky-tonk-ish piano chords that make it seem as if the laughing people were in a bar not a circus. (A clever person would be able to make some witty comment about entertainment here.) And while the loops make some of the laughing sound sinister rather than jolly, I do think you’ll find yourself grinning from time to time. The shortest movement is the minute Galop, which is a minute and a half of gradually louder hoofbeats, fairly natural (only a little bit of added reverb) and then about ten seconds of quite stunningly altered hoof sound. The opening of the Finale sounds like the opening of the Scherzo from far far away. But only the opening. It is the grand summation (as the Allegro was the introduction) of the whole piece. It’s as if the piece is made up of various short versions of itself, a truly fascinating idea, and much fun to listen to. For clips of Cirque, go to http://www.electrocd.com/fr/cat/imed_9525/

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L’étoile Absinthe

michaelkarman — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 21:34:15 +0000

This piece is extraordinarily beautiful and compelling.
I almost want to just leave it at that, too, except that that might be misunderstood. So here are some details. It opens with just over a minute’s worth of all the material that will make up its twenty minute span: a heart-stopping little figure for voice (barely recognizable as voice but as equally unmistakable), a high, shimmering, rising figure, and a low electronic whoomp that mimics the voice figure. That’s it, except for the diminution several minutes in that makes the voice figure come galloping in at two or three times its original speed and the other low pitched sound around the four minute mark that mimics the shape of the high, shimmering figure. And of course the fact that these figures repeat constantly but never exactly, and that the relations between the three (or four) are constantly shifting. It is an extraordinarily beautiful and compelling piece.

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