Sous le regard d’un soleil noir

To my sons and their mother

It is a question here of a ‘particular form of human tragedy.’ A space for ontological insecurity, the loss of reality, the dissolution of the being and the exploding of personality, where a universe of implacable confinement is constructed: that of schizophrenia.

It is not a question of scientific thought. The ‘clinical commentaries’ that serve as landmarks throughout the work — these comments of a therapist/coryphaeus (although not devoid of tenderness) — only serve to introduce the distance, using few caesurae that will spare pathos from the pathetic, and in regard to ourselves, voyeurism.

It is the poetic reading of a text not designed as a poem, but whose images impose by the weight of the message and the decisiveness of the words. I have also chosen intelligibility, only provoking semantic parasites as an echo of the apparent verbal perplexity, the obscure terrain of delirium.

Sous le regard d’un soleil noir is the history of a shipwreck: the hallucinated derivation across an obsessional landscape where the note B natural is the obsessed character, the tonic axis that binds together the eight sections. A veritable ostinato, ‘Invention on one note’: the memory of Wozzeck stands out, the symbol of a man who, according to Jacques Drillon, “drowns himself in the lake because he has arrived at the point of social and interior inexistence from which there is no possible return.”

Perhaps however, the successful voyage consists, as Laing proposes, in going from the exterior towards the interior, from life towards the ‘experience’ of death, from movement to immobility…

… then to travel the path in the opposite direction to encounter an existential renaissance.

The eight sections of the work were inspired by reading the work of the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Ronald D Laing. The texts are borrowed (with the generous permission of the author and Éditions Stock — French translation by Claude Elsen) from the French translations of the three books The Politics of Experience, Knots, and — especially — The Divided Self.

The original version of Sous le regard d’un soleil noir [Beneath the Glare of a Black Sun] was realized in 1979-80 in the studios of the Faculty of Music of the Université de Montréal and during November/December 1981 in the studio of the Ina-GRM (Paris, France) for the sixth section, Citadelle intérieure [Inner Citadel], which was added to the initial version. Sous le regard d’un soleil noir premiered on February 3, 1981, at the Université de Montréal and was presented at the 11th Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music (France) on June 14, 1981. Section 6, Citadelle intérieure was a commission from the Ina-GRM (Paris, France). The composition of this piece was made possible by an artistic creation grant from the Music Section of the Minister of Culture and Communications, (France, 1979) as well as the amiable invitation from the Faculty of Music of the Université de Montréal. Sous le regard d’un soleil noir was awarded the 1st prize in the Electroacoustic Program Music category at the 9th International Electroacoustic Music Competition in Bourges (France, 1981). The recorded voices are those of Arthur Bergeron, Marthe Forget, and Pierre Louet.

Premiere

• February 3, 1981, Concert, Salle 1020 — Faculté de musique — Pavillon Marguerite-d’Youville — Université de Montréal, Montréal (Québec)
• March 28, 1983, Premiere of the final version: Cycle acousmatique 1983: Concert 10, Grand Auditorium — Maison de Radio France, Paris (France)

Awards

• 1st prize, Electroacoustic Program Music Prize, 9th Bourges International Electroacoustic Music Competition 1981, Bourges (Cher, France)

Forêt profonde

To my mother

Forêt profonde (Deep Forest) is an acousmatic melodrama, based on Bruno Bettelheim’s essay The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (Alfred A Knopf / Random House, New York 1976), of which this is the third version; an extensively modified version, almost double in length compared to earlier versions. Forêt profonde is a work that has accompanied me for the past fifteen years, and its final production required more than two years.

Begun thirteen years after Sous le regard d’un soleil noir, Forêt profonde also derives its inspiration from a psychoanalytic reflection. An adult reading of children tales that moves between the memory of my naïve wonder and the discovery of its secret mechanisms. This hesitating between two ages perhaps presents the risk of failing to reach either one; but it is nevertheless possible for the magical intuition of childhood, that always sleeps in us with one eye open, to revive buried revelations, and for the rational mind to delight in deciphering, under the manifest content of this universal unconscious, the logic of its latent content.

It is a listening on three levels — novelistic, symbolic, musical — more disconcerting no doubt, but more active than an unidimensional listening.

The human journey of Bruno Bettelheim, whose thoughts are behind this star shaped course, interferes, for obvious reasons, with these old stories that confront us with questions on our time.

A guided tour of the childhood soul, which is nothing more than a return to the initiatory world — both cruel and reassuring — of fairy tales.

Forêt profonde comprises 13 sections, of which the 6 Chambres (Rooms) (sections 1, 3, 6, 8, 10, 12) constitute transit periods / areas, secret passages of sort, between the seven thematic sections (sections 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13). These Chambres contain little or no text.

Each of the 13 sections borrows a brief element, a colour, an atmosphere, from the 13 Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood) op 15 by Schumann, as a tribute to this pathetic composer, engulfed in the depth of his forest.

I wish to thank Inés Wickmann Jaramillo for offering me a poetic Colombian sound recording, and Beatriz Ferreyra for allowing me in such friendly manner to borrow a short but colourful excerpt from her Petit Poucet magazine (1985).

Forêt profonde was commissioned by the French State (Music Office) and the Ina-GRM (Paris). A bursary from the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) (category A) was awarded for the composition of the work. Most of the materials and the treatments were obtained through the Syter (real-time sound synthesis system) at the Ina-GRM, and the piece was realized at the composer’s studio in Montréal (Québec). The present final version premiered on June 8, 1996 during a concert presented by ACREQ (Association pour la création et la recherche électroacoustiques du Québec) at Usine C in Montréal. The two first versions (36:00 and 37:00) were premiered respectively in Paris on May 16, 1994 during the Cycle acousmatique Son-Mu of the Ina-GRM, in the Salle Olivier Messiaen of the Maison de Radio France (Paris, France), and on September 1, 1995 at the Futura Festival of Acousmatic Art in Crest (France).

The piece was awarded the “Prix de la meilleure création contemporaine électroacoustique” (best contemporary electroacoustic work) of the Prix de Printemps 2007 organized by Sacem.

Premiere

• May 16, 1994, Cycle acousmatique Son-Mu 94: Concert, Salle Olivier Messiaen — Maison de Radio France, Paris (France)
• September 1, 1995, Futura 95: Concert portrait 3, Salle municipale, Crest (Drôme, France)
• June 8, 1996, Premiere of the final version: Francis Dhomont: en deux temps trois mouvements, Usine C, Montréal (Québec)

Awards

• Prize for the best contemporary electroacoustic creation, Prix de Printemps de la SACEM 2007, France

Le cri du Choucas

To my father (the one Franz did not have)

Conceived in 1997 and left to mature slowly, Le cri du Choucas is the third and final instalment in my “Cycle des profondeurs” [Cycle of Depths], the first two parts of this long triptych (about three hours) being Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (1981) and Forêt profonde (1994-96), of which a few reminders are included in this instalment. All three are “electroacoustic melodramas” (Michel Chion) inspired by a psychoanalytic approach — Marthe Robert’s in this case, especially an insightful essay by this literary critic, translator, and psychoanalyst entitled As Lonely as Franz Kafka (1979). As Pierre Schaeffer said, “[…] how could we not wonder about the development of music itself, which mysteriously seems to build a bridge between psychology of perceptions and psychology of depths?” and, a fortiori, about the origins of this perceptive music that is acousmatic music, “psychology of depths” being just another name for psychoanalysis.

About the title Le cri du choucas, which means “The Jackdaw’s Call”… Kavka is the Czech word for jackdaw, a bird akin to a crow whose effigy Hermann Kafka, Franz’s father, used for his store sign. Kafka himself wrote “I am a jackdaw, a helpless kavka.” This match and this title are inspired by the animal symbolism found in Kafka’s works: the deep call, the solitary, unusual, often-choked, never-emphasized cry that you can hear in every single tale, however fragmentary, by this author.

Before the Law, a famous section of The Trial, serves as the red thread of my piece, the Law being a metaphoric representation of the impenetrable realms the human mind hits, and not — as what the Vulgate and the adjective “Kafkaesque” usually reduce Kafka’s complex thoughts to — a portrait of bureaucratic aberrations. It is mostly “what you cannot possibly escape from”: a doorway to knowledge is open especially for the man who gets to it, although he is also forbidden to pass through it. Which means that his — metaphysical — question remains unanswered. Symmetrically, a crucial message is addressed to him, although it will never reach him. “In The Penal Colony,” writes Marthe Robert, Kafka “reduces the law to nothing more than an inordinate power of coercion whose sole function is to automatically enforce punishment” [our translation].

Before this long piece, there were four Études pour Kafka which form, alongside new elements, the musical materials of this melodrama. However, these materials are assembled in a different order to fit a script highlighted by texts by and about Kafka told by multiple voices, some of them known, unknown, or transformed.

These are some of the themes covered in this work: the Law, guilt, the father, solitude, dreams, impossible messages, and death. You will hear, by order of appearance, excerpts from The Trial, The Penal Colony, Letter to His Father, The Verdict, Diary, Letters to Felice, The Burrow, A Message from the Emperor, and The Metamorphosis.

— Francis Dhomont [English translation: François Couture, i-16]

Le cri du Choucas [The Jackdaw’s Call] was realized at the composer’s studio in Avignon (France), and premiered on October 15, 2014 at Théâtre Marni as part of the festival L’Espace du son in Brussels (Belgium). The piece was commissioned by Musiques & Recherches (Ohain, Belgium). The piece benefited, in its long research stage, of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA) in 1997. Franz Kafka’s original texts have been translated anew in French by Francis Dhomont. Recorded voices: Martin Engler, Marthe Forget, Tom Goldschmit, Pierre Louet, Marthe Robert, Hans Tutschku, Annette Vande Gorne, Marie-Jeanne Wyckmans, plus a few anonymous quotes. Warm thanks, for their acute listening, help, and judicious advice, to: François Bayle, Gilles Gobeil, Hans Tutschku, Annette Vande Gorne, and Inés Wickmann.

Premiere

• October 15, 2014, L’Espace du son 2014: Création mondiale de Francis Dhomont, Théâtre Marni, Brussels (Belgium)
• June 5, 2015, Premiere of the Spring 2015 version: Klang! électroacoustique 2015: Concert 3: Around the World, Salle Pétrarque — Hôtel de Varennes, Montpellier (Hérault, France)
• April 28, 2016, Premiere of the final version (Autumn 2015): T-Son 2016: T-Son 90: Kafka Revisitado, Teatro Maria de Lourdes Sekeff — Instituto de Artes da Unesp, São Paulo (Brazil)