Skip to main contentSkip to audio controlsSkip to footer

Avec le temps…

Stéphane Roy

Programme notes

Time passing like a quiet caravan, a perpetual flow that ignores human beings with their consciousness of past, present and future, a movement that nothing can derail or slow down and that flows inexorably through infinite small slices of “present”: this is the background on which our existences unfold. Music, like any art of time, unfolds in this dimension, but at the same time it gives it a human face, creating an experiential time where the temporal flow, either precipitous and elusive or frozen in suspension, “remembers” or “anticipates,” contracts, dilates, and wraps around itself in an endless loop.

Avec le temps… is a 5.1 multichannel acousmatic suite that includes nine miniatures with their own temporal identity. These miniatures can be presented in variable geometry and assembled in a different order for each concert to highlight new dynamic relationships between them. I leave it to the listener to determine the temporality of these different moments. But beyond the temporal thematic, there is the music which dominates experiential time through its phonographies, its spatial configurations, its meaningful silences, its lyricism, and its fury. “Sound-footprints” recur at various moments throughout the acousmatic suite, as well as a leitmotiv formed by an iteration in echo, which can be regular, in contraction or in dilation, and which symbolizes experiential time.

[ii-23]


Avec le temps… was realized in 2022 at the composer’s studio in Brossard with research and creation funding from the Canada Council for the Arts (CCA). The grouping of the miniatures chute, tressaillement, and ondoiement from Avec le temps… was awarded an Honorable Mention at the 12th Musicworks Electronic Music Composition Contest (Toronto, Canada, 2022-23).

Premiere

  • March 17, 2023, Assemblage II: Portrait de la musique électroacoustique au Québec: Concert 8 — Stéphane Roy, Studio dôme — Faculté de musique — Université de Montréal, Montréal (Québec)

Awards

  • Composer(s): Stéphane Roy
  • Year of composition: 2022, 24
  • Instrumentation: 5.1-channel fixed medium
  • Publisher(s): Ymx média

Movements

horizon

ondoiement

éther

fugacité

errance

rêve

tressaillement

chute

fracture