Francis Dhomont

Cycle de l’Errance is an acousmatic triptych by Francis Dhomont, composed over eight years from late 1981 to 1989. Its subject is travel and its symbolic offshoots (escape, love, flight, space, disappearance, the loss of oneself), with natural images merging into pure abstraction. It forms the first part of Mouvances~Métaphores, seven works united around movement, and the booklet texts were first written for the 1991 edition of that project, published to mark the composer's 65th birthday.

Points de fuite (1982), dedicated to Jean-Louis Ostrowski, is the common well for the whole cycle: a study of glides, masses and spatial mobility that won 2nd prize at Bourges in 1984. … mourir un peu expands it into nine movements, made at the GMEM studio in Marseille and in Montréal and premiered among the ruins of the old Phocaean harbour in 1984. The sea runs through it, giving the music its law of ebb and flow, and the long fourth movement, Thème de la fuite, reworks Points de fuite on a large scale. Brief quotations from Érotica appear with the permission of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry. Espace / Escape (1989), commissioned by Claude Schryer at The Banff Centre, sets open, intimate and broken spaces against the vertigo of flight, using spatialization as a carrier of meaning; it includes a short recording given by Christian Calon and received an honorable mention at Prix Ars Electronica 1993.

Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont studied with Nadia Boulanger and Charles Koechlin, and in the late 1940s discovered on his own, with magnetic wire, what Schaeffer would later call musique concrète. Since 1963 he has worked only with fixed media. He taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996. The booklet adds texts by François Bayle and Jean-François Denis.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9607, 1996.