Mémoires vives

Description

Our program revolves around four pieces composed between 1967 and 1987, each born from the encounter between a composer and a performer. The whole forms a coherent unit, each piece belonging to fields of musical and sonic research shared with the others. First, rethinking the musical language of the guitar: the codes of classical music are sometimes broken or handled with a certain humor in these works, the guitar often being used with the idea of imitating another instrument. Next, pushing beyond the technical possibilities of the instrument, to further the quest for expressiveness: each piece in our program indeed requires the use of novel playing techniques, which engage the performer's hands in a new way or involve various external objects, sometimes staged. Also, fostering a material listening of sound, giving full importance to resonance, harmonic timbre, grain, and attacks, with the idea of composing a true "soundscape." Finally, questioning the relationship to time and the stage, by focusing attention on slow transformations, repetitions, micro-events, ruptures, gestures, favoring the composition of a complete musical imaginary. Three improvised pieces, inspired by the previously described works, the instruments used during the recording, or the particular acoustics of the spaces at the Conservatoire de Paris, complete our program. These improvisational moments were designed to exploit the same means and explore the same fields of sonic research as those at work within the written pieces of our program.