Violostries

Bernard Parmegiani - Violostries

From the liner notes by Bernard Parmegiani:

The three pieces composed between 1963 and 1976, which appear on the first record, belong to what 1 shall call "the sewing age": a period during which scissors helped us to calibrate sounds and silences, while we turned the buttons to get rid of undesirable frequencies or, on the contrary, added frequencies, supposedly to provide supplementary sounds when they seemed dull to us in their natural state.

Violostries is this first work as a couturier's apprentice, which led me to lacemaking. Devy Erlih, the instigator and author of the violin part, provided me with the material for the work, the thread, we might say, the knots and the embellishments: cells of sound, woven, stitched, linked, taut, sustained sounds.

After a chaotic, massive (macro-temporal) introduction followed by pulsions and (micro) sound clusters brought into play by the violin "soloist", the work opens out into a continually progressing fluid mass.

The latter announces Capture ephemere (1967), which had to be exorcised soon afterwards (1971), with Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphee. "En finir" was in fact simply a settling of scores with certain stylistic choices, certain over-familiar forms. Here the kinetics of the sounds was no longer shown through masses or agglomerates but through sound units, each dated with an internal movement: superposition of trajectories, cycles with shifting timbres.

Dedans-Dehors (1977) broadens the field of metamorphoses previously put to the test in the movement of De Natura Sonorum entitled Matieres incluites where natural sounds (sounds from nature) were confronted with artificial sounds (synthetic sounds).

These metamorphoses reflect: changes: passages from fluid to solid, and carry along with them the notion of "inside-outside" (dialectic a la Bachelard), the expression of which is manifested through a few sounds symbols: in phase/out of phase breathing-the door: place of transition the wave: internal-external energy sound crescendo: distant, close, the approach...

The second record is representative, as far as I am concerned, of a new era in acousmatic music, where the scissors are partly replaced by the mouse running over the windows of the computer. Since 1985, musical computer technology has become the complementary tool, which I used moderately, whilst not forgetting to dip the point of those scissors into the ink of sound.

Exerpt from Rouge-Mort (1987) after carmen by Prosper Merimee.

Choreography by Vittorio Biagi, Nice Opera House.

Merimee's simple style reveals a set of themes that are close to Greek tragedy. Each character is inexorably pushed towards his ruin. Thanatos, here, after Eros, represents the duality of an inevitable fate.

The use of a magic ritual, justified by the gipsy origin of Carmen, enables us to punctuate the accomplishment of the tragedy with a series of iterative premonitory signs. To certain of these signs, I have given sound equivalents, with either timbres or melodic motifs. As Carmen is a very well-known work, it was less important to respect the details of the story than to reconsider the myth in the light of different means, such as those of electroacoustic music.

Tracklisting:

CD1

1. Violostries: Pulsion-miroir {4:34}

2. Violostries: Jeu de cellules {3:04}

3. Violostries: Végétal {9:13}

4. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: Faire {6:49}

5. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: Défaire {2:11}

6. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: Kaléidoscope I {2:53}

7. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: Kaléidoscope II {4:23}

8. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: L'Oscillée {3:28}

9. Pour en finir avec le pouvoir d'Orphée: Unisson des voix {3:53}

10. Dedans-Dehors: En phase/Hors phase {2:29}

11. Dedans-Dehors: Jeux {5:10}

12. Dedans-Dehors: Retour de la forét {3:22}

13. Dedans-Dehors: Métamorphoses {6:19}

14. Dedans-Dehors: Lointain-proche {5:01}

CD2

1. Rouge-Mort : Thanatos: Premiers signes {2:44}

2. Rouge-Mort : Thanatos: Derniers jeux {5:12}

3. Rouge-Mort : Thanatos: Séduction froide {4:00}

4. Rouge-Mort : Thanatos: Ultime danse {5:05}

5. Exercisme 3: De l'oiseau de désert {3:41}

6. Exercisme 3: De la variation {2:41}

7. Exercisme 3: Des perspectives {3:38}

8. Exercisme 3: Des glissements {6:12}

9. Exercisme 3: D'autres perspectives {2:49}

10. Exercisme 3: De la couleur {4:57}

11. Le présent composé: Temps figé {6:15}

12. Le présent composé: Intermittence {5:40}

13. Le présent composé: Présence {4:42}

14. Le présent composé: Temps pulsé {7:12}

(1) (2)