For violin and fixed sunds (1992/93)
9’36”
Commissioned by the DRAC, Nantes.
Even though I had some proximity with the notion of mixed music in “Macristalhias” I set myself to use another type of writing. The concept of “mixed” (in the sense of mixture) entail a certain separation of the elements that constitute them. I have wanted to replace this overlay or mixture premise with a unique language constituted by diverse materials. This led me to enrich both aspects in different ways:
From the universe typical of electroacoustics emerges an organization of instrumental time that is intimately linked to the material. There is a concern for a certain sound efficacy of the instrumental gestures, that points to a symbiosis of both worlds, not only from the point of view of timbre but also from articulation and morphology. The instrumental world determined the organization of the heights of music recorded in a studio. This brought to the forefront the interaction which rules the writing of the electronic part in a way that the inexorability of the passing of time (of fixed sounds) is not felt. It is because of this quality of writing that we have the impression that what is fixed responds to the expectations and intentions of the instrumentalists.
The composition’s poetic universe is an answer to the two words that make up the title: Mathias, my son, a beginner violinist (5 years old when I wrote it) and crystal. By amalgamating the diverse auditory components of the work I focused on an idea of development in which solidity and extreme fragility make one think about crystal (as well as the weight tradition has in the idea of immutable crystal) an their facets that let us see new perspectives of the same object.
The realization of fixed sounds include synthetic sounds coming from diverse sources as well as violin sounds transformed by the Syter system (from Ina-GRA) and organized with the help for diverse programs and traditions methods of electronic writing.
Macristalhias
Violin : Patrick Févai
Recorded at the première in Nantes 1993.
*Score on demand
