Transfer

In co-production with Ircam-Centre Pompidou, this program for acoustic instruments and electroacoustic devices works on sound matter and organic correspondences in the three dimensions of an imaginary space.

Composer Florent Caron Darras presents his work Transfert as both an evolving music and an atmospheric experience, a sound installation crossing the threshold of the concert. “Conceived as imaginary species with their own behaviors, ten instruments on stage deploy sound figures in the concert hall, giving life to an immersive acoustic space surrounding the audience. Inhabited by instrumental and synthetic sounds, Transfert has the particularity of being composed according to observations made on real soundscapes, some of the original sounds being replaced by those of the instruments or synthesizers. Placed very precisely in time and space, the imagined sounds are similar to the sound manifestation of a wild fauna in its natural environment: a transfer from real landscapes to imaginary musical landscapes. Between the imaginary of the living and the technological imaginary, Transfert offers a unique experience by operating displacements and junctions between the instrumental world, landscape representation and electronic abstraction.

Natasha Barrett‘s acousmatic work flourishes through spatialized devices. Commissioned by Ircam-Centre Pompidou with the participation of cultural institutions in Norway – where the English composer resides – Hidden Values (2012) relies, in the form of a metaphorical narrative, on three pretexts adapted to a compositional use of space in a three-dimensional listening scene. The Umbrella protects from the environment until it becomes a useless clutter. The Lock protects and encloses us, it is the theater of power and conflict. The Optical Tubes – ancestors of the glasses – modify the experience of the real, by playing on the net and the blur, the distance and the proximity.

By Olivier Messiaen – who considered electronic music to be the most important musical phenomenon of the 20th century – the last piece of the last book of the Catalogue d’oiseaux (Bird catalog) (1958), for solo piano, comes as a counterpoint – spatial, acoustic, metaphorical – to a program that plays, in a more or less direct way, with the shape of space and the imaginary of nature. On the island of Ouessant, in the wild Finistère, sings Le Courlis cendré: (The curlew)“slow and sad tremolos, chromatic ascents, wild trills, and a call in tragically repeated glissando, which expresses all the desolation of the marine landscapes.“