Lire la musique au concert
Résumé
"Appetizer" presentation speech, program notes offer a form of symbolic framing and a concrete support of the works at the same time and places as their meeting with the concert audiences.
Consisting of reduced and ephemeral texts with implicitly defined functions and random items, they are visited by a musicology primarily significant for analysis and works programming considerations. It is true that the discourse of the composer, diversified (descriptive, explanatory, expressive, circumstantial, etc.) can borrow from the categories of musical analysis, and thus its problems in the case of electroacoustic music (Campos & Donin : 2009, Delalande, 1995, 2013). The words of the composer are tools, deictic, shifters, seeking to establish the work securely in its context, to facilitate the perception or deepen understanding of the unique work they are responsible for presenting.
These notes are part of the protean filiation theoretical writings of composers on their own production which develop and diversify, especially from the 19th century, thanks to the development of publishing and other media testifying the increase of subjective and critical look specific to modernity. This phenomenon is amplified and institutionalized in the case of contemporary music and even more electroacoustic.
Actually, commentators of contemporary music identify two tension poles that affect it in its languages, forms and techniques on the one hand and social functions on the other. The renunciation of the tonal reference and its meaningful and expressive properties established, give way to the individualization of compositional systems, favored by the technical expertise in the context of globalization. This autonomous attitude questions its ability to symbolize and communicate with the public. The aesthetic judgment built around tonality is unable to organize the rational and emotional components of various works and have to be listened to differently.
The mediation of the composer’s comment is more than ever essential to a situation of broadcasting in which the electroacoustic work is revealed in the unheard and the unseen, because of the absence of the usual visual references such as instruments, interpreters and scoring. The composer, even more than the analyst establishes explicit links that the work has with the world using the compositional means available. Communication issues are closely linked to those of composition, being crossed by the same tensions. The program notes express their preferred traces. However, few historical studies have sought to identify filiation, even less to analyze them on their own, as a phenomenon specific to a context which becomes systematic in 1950 and is considered in a very special way in the case of electroacoustic music.
Is there a specific metalinguistic electroacoustic music flow? What words do composers choose in texts that describe according to the listening guide, mind (intentions and procedures) for the creation, broadcasting and collection of unique musical works? What processes and discursive fields are most often used to conceptualize the aesthetics of sound in the case of electroacoustic music? Finally, in what way are these records significantly oriented towards the listener?
The investigation which is the subject of the work presented here borrows from validation methods specific to social sciences and focuses on two socio-semiotic corpus, one written, consisting of a double set of references of works written in 1975 and 1985 and filed in the Documentation Centre of Contemporary Music in Paris, the other one is oral and comes from a sample speech of composers of electroacoustic music.
Two lines of analysis, by communicative genres and themes, designed to observe the flow of the particular language mobilized by composers, when constrained by the work and its broadcasting device.
Descriptive records are the result of selected elements of the work considered relevant by the composer. Expressive genre, related to human presence, is problematic in the case of electroacoustic music. The argumentative genre seeks to justify the compositional approach.
Thematic analysis, in the case of electroacoustic music, lays stress on the importance of the title, noise trace of the work, of the technical device and of the vocabulary, which is the specific, shared and sustainable sound reality. Metaphor plays a significant role, due to the importance of sensory perception, especially visual, the work operating in a continuous and static space.
The analysis of the interviews allows to construct a typology linking the writing practice of these texts and the universe of meaning that composers associate to it. Some composers attach importance to underlying meanings to the works they seek to expose listeners to. Others on the contrary are concerned about the immanent spatio-temporal sound qualities and adopt for the record a minimalist speech. Finally, some composers are particularly concerned with the question of the concert, and consider it as a complex time-space whose components must be worked to integrate the listener.
Thus, we hypothesize that these program notes provide a fertile and renewed prism of analysis of the aesthetic and ideological issues and problems related to the field of musical creation and especially electroacoustic music.
The links between the record and the work depend on a social construction. Discursive categories cover components of the works with sufficient symbolic power to be given as a model, as evidenced by the metaphorical and operational concept of sound space.
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