Acousmatrix - The History of Electronic Music III

by "Blue" Gene TyrannyA lovely work of electro-acoustic music by one of the French pioneers of musique concrète, "Petite Symphonie Intuitive Pour un Paysage de Printemps" ("Little Intuitive Symphony for a Spring Landscape") recreates the composer's experiences during a climb toward sunset on the Causse Méjean, a high plateau in the Massif Central, including his recollection of a shepherd's flute and its reverberations across the landscape. The flute sounds and multiple echoes continue in changing musical modes throughout the piece (the tonic redefined by electronic drones), blending together with sounds of the countryside and conversational fragments from the human presence to create a beautiful sonic landscape of 25 minutes duration. "Hétérozygote" is a musique concrète composition realized on tape; it combines fragments of conversations and other sounds and noises from nature and daily life in an organized and poetic manner (although not plot-oriented). Bits of human speech in several languages are used both for their charm of meaning and their musical qualities of inflection and pitch. At one moment several people express how much they enjoyed having visited some unnamed place. At another moment a mysterious transformed voice chants "dans un reve" (in a dream), but the accompanying sounds are more like the real creaks and crashes of a house in a windy storm, with intermittent disturbed cries from the sleeper. For the first time in a musique concrète work, the sounds are modulated and transformed but retain their natural character; the result is not abstract, but rather moves about the world with the ease of a thought or a dream. In the Presque Rien (Almost Nothing) series of musique concrète pieces, Ferrari further developed this technique and sensibility with sounds and their interconnections that are almost unidentifiable, while nevertheless retaining a feeling of naturalness.