Program Notes
Ondřej Adámek
Fishbones (2007)
The sounds that glide through the air carry a certain nostalgia, solitude, anxiety. . . . They sound like the human voice! The submerged percussion instruments drown us in an aquatic sonority; that crescendo becomes a metallic roar. The cynical idea of the fishy life cycle came to me while I was ‘sophisticating’ this piece—a life that begins with an egg hatching freely in the ocean to end up in a form of pressurized canned food.
Pierre Jodlowski
Mécano 1 (2004)
The piece is trying to stage a singular object—the metronome—in the universe of the musician. This ‘unit’ of measurement usually accompanies the composer and performer during the development and learning of a work—and then it disappears at the time of the concert, giving way to an inaudible pulse and fluctuation. In this music, to the contrary, the metronome is shown (a small engine hitting the surfaces of the drums), imposing the mechanics, both static and fragile. The music reveals itself as a construction game between man and the little mechanical arm.
Juri Seo
Shuî (2017)
I conceived Shuî as a miniaturized version of an extended musical meditation. The circular shape of the instrument—the round bowl—and the long resonance are all conducive to the meditative environment. As in any ensemble music—and perhaps more palpable in this case—the performers are indispensable parts of the whole. This work was conceived for three performers each playing two crotales. Sixtrum arranged the work for six musicians to develop the sound interactions in space.
Pierre Jodlowski
24 Loops (2007)
24 Loops is part of a cumulative music cycle initiated in 2006 with a piece for string quartet. The principle of cumulative writing is to use electronic resources for stacking sequences played live. In the pieces I’ve written according to this principle all the music played by the musicians is frozen in time by a system of looping. The music created is the stacking of successive elements. In this piece, a scenic process is added in order to create a kind of round where each musician turns around the percussions to fill the sound space. After the twenty-fourth cell, the music can be improvised upon a continuous and free crescendo.
The following works were born of a collaboration during the summer of 2020 with Léa Boudreau, Samuel Bobony, and Dominic Thibault, developing autonomous sound installations enabling the electronic processing of sound, and capable of being played both indoors and outdoors. The chosen theme was that of wind and water, whose presence at the heart of the instrumental device makes it possible to transform timbre and to play with sounds captured underwater with hydrophones (microphones designed for underwater use).
Dominic Thibault
D’aure et de pluie—Célérité (2020)
Sound travels at different speeds depending on its propagation medium—air and water, two universes with different sound behaviors. This metaphor inspires the present piece, in which time compresses, expands, disintegrates, and ellipses.
Léa Boudreau
D’aure et de pluie—Jeux d’eau (2020)
This work proposes a playful approach to creation and interpretation, allowing musicians to interact easily with each other and with sound-processing in real time through various open musical ‘scenes’. The inclusion of toys and non-traditional percussive objects completes these comical intentions with the aim of making contemporary music more accessible for the duration of a concert.
Samuel Bobony
D’aure et de pluie—À grand fracas (2020)
Samuel Bobony has a hybrid practice as a drummer and electroacoustic composer. He is interested in the different levels of reality involved in creating real-time samplings and manipulating their temporality. This allows the interactive musical gestures between the ensemble’s percussionists and their sound manipulations to be frozen out of time. Using underwater hydrophone recordings, the unusual sound loops are then modulated by effect chains designed specifically for this work.
