For viola and fixed sounds
Commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture and the l’INA-GRM.
Premiered on February the 6th 2001 in the Olivier Messiæn Concert Hall. Radio France.
Duration: 12′ 58″
This work is the 15th part of the Urbana* cycle, and the first of a smaller cycle for one instrument and electronics in multichannel (most of them in a 5.1 system).
In this piece I intended to touch the extremes. The framework is in this case very important, it is a formal constraint and the substance itself of the entire purpose: the loneliness of the player facing the audience and surrounded by the electronics sounds.
In every mixed work we have this duality of the presence and the absence: a double discourse and a double imagination. On the one hand we directly hear the manner of a compositor himself, without any intermediation, the sounds and the organization he materializes in the studio are the same in the concert hall. On the other hand we have the interpretation of a second manner, through our hero for some minutes.
The public lies in between: between skin and clothing, between the frame and the canvas, between the stage and the actors, between the script and the camera. Caught in the trap of observation, an observation that can only become subversion within the energy and movement, the public becomes actor of the event.
The traditional “Diabolus in musica” appears in this work in this dissonance created between both words, acoustic and electroacoustic.
In this kind of setting, where the forces are essentially sound and morphology, the work can exist if the public catches, in his off field, the reality of music, this unknown ultimate journey.
Diabolus Urbanus
Anabela Chaves, alto.
Recorded by Jean-Marc Lyzwa
at Festival Présences the 6 february 2001
* score on demand, not published.
[ Urbana Cycle ]
[ Solo instrument / with or without electronics ]
