Claude Schryer

Autour gathers four pieces by Claude Schryer, composed between 1995 and 1997, that form a cycle on environmental awareness and the musicality of the North American acoustic environment. Each stands for a cardinal point, and the running order follows the Native North American Wheel of Life: East, South, West, North. Schryer transforms and orchestrates recorded soundscapes in search of what French theorists Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue called the Sharawadji effect, a sensation of plenitude in front of a complex soundscape whose beauty cannot be explained.

Musique de l’Odyssée sonore condenses the music Schryer wrote for Louis Ricard’s National Film Board of Canada documentary on R Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecology and the sounds of Québec City, made with sound designer Claude Langlois. El medio ambiente acústico de México is a radiophonic soundwalk drawn from recordings made in the fall of 1995 in Mexico City and Oaxaca: the Pacific at Puerto Angel, a military band at the Zocalo, Monarch butterflies in Angangueo. Vancouver Soundscape Revisited, dedicated to Hildegard Westerkamp, reworks archive sounds of the World Soundscape Project from the early 1970s and recordings by Bob MacNevin for Simon Fraser University; it premiered in eight channels at the Vancouver New Music Festival in 1996 and appears here in stereo.

Autour d’une Musique portuaire, made with radio producer Hélène Prévost, starts from a live Radio-Canada broadcast of March 3, 1996, when six boats locked in the frozen port of Montréal, two trains and the bells of the Notre-Dame Basilica played a score Schryer conducted by walkie-talkie. A few days later Jean Derome (baritone saxophone), Tom Walsh (trombone) and Schryer (bass clarinet) improvised around it in Studio 12 of Maison Radio-Canada. The piece won the Prix de la création radiophonique 1996.

Born in Ottawa in 1959, Schryer studied with Owen Underhill, with alcides lanza at McGill, and with Denis Smalley and Luc Ferrari. He co-founded the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology and won a 2nd prize at Bourges in 1986 for a kindred spirit.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9736, 1997.