For a double (or divided) orchestra and electronics.
Commissioned by the State with a pedagogical purpose.
Premiered by Seine-Saint-Denis Jeune Philharmonique on 1st April 2003.
The original name for his work is a junction of Double Urbana (U 17 – CROSS AND FICTIONS) and an electroacoustic extension.
Both movements from Double Urbana (U17) are picked up in Double Concerto (U21) constituting the first and fourth of its nine movements.
I- Introduction to double space
II- Intermedio 1 – Electronic cadenza 1
III- Urban Episode 1
IV- Lento Glissando
V- Intermedio 2 – Acousmatic Cadenza
VI.Urban Episode 2
VII- Responso
VIII- Urban Episode 3
IX- Cross and Fictions
Urban Episodes I, II and III, of approximately one minute, have a function of remembrance and renovation of the form of the other six parts. It is an almost textual repetition whose objective is the fixation of a reference point for the numerous musical vectors.
Monumental and mixed work.
This Double Concerto has many peculiarities. One of them is the relation between orchestra and electronics. In the preceding music writing and aesthetic reflection I have wanted to develop a series of constants that become part of my way of organizing the discourse.
To begin with, and before going beyond the “spectacular” aspect of this project, I would like to reflect upon the mixed character of the work and the real space where the music is developed. This set of observations is applied both to the situation of live electronics and to that of mixed pieces in general.
It is a story of forces: my music experiences in a mixed situation (both my own and those that place me as a hearer) have evoked a feeling for a centrifugal relation of forces. Based on the human component, on the instrumentalist as the center, most of the works tend to make this acoustic reality the starting point of an explosion of sound in the space that surrounds us, attributed to technology and loudspeakers. After the moment of discovery and surprise, this dispersion of sound reality entails a discourse dissolution that ends up being tiring and systematic.
Paradoxically, the most interesting situation consists on the re centering of the discourse over the instruments present in the scene which are the true tangible actor in the musical reality. This way, a centripetal force of vectors that electroacoustics introduces to the center of the action is generated. The implementation of discourse by many composers puts aside this essential component of perception, the true essence of the act of listening to music.
An exception, which might be the most enriching and revolutionary, appearing in the second half of the twentieth century, is the acousmatic music that proposes and questions, almost by definition, the causality of sound phenomenon when bringing into the auditory scene a palette of events that had not been integrated until that moment in the concert halls. Beyond the sound revolution, there is an auditory revolution which, lacking of producers gesture, situates us in an environment of pure music.
In the case in point, this odd Double Concerto, we are fully and exactly in the junction of the issue: electroacoustic and instrument will be parallel but will inexorably integrate. What is left is the open field of a new musical poetic built from the distance between the direct material and the detachment of the person who produced the sound. This is precisely because the discourse is not focused on the mirage of a decorative electronic, but it is the electronic that is located in the very heart of the musical ideal and its audible appearance.
To deny colorism is to deny a “musique française” sense frequently associated to the voluptuous but also to the superficiality of the discourse. This is the theme of a wide debate, which does not have a place among these lines but is not eluded when composing.
