Francis Dhomont

Cycle du Son is a 56-minute cycle of four acousmatic works by Francis Dhomont, written between 1989 and 1998 as a homage to Pierre Schaeffer for the fiftieth anniversary of musique concrète. All four draw on the same material, forged from the first movement of Schaeffer’s Étude aux objets and from sounds Dhomont had stored away over the years, and they grow out of one another through allusion, commentary and continuation. The complete cycle premiered at the L’Espace du son festival in Brussels in November 1998.

Novars (1989), the third part but the first composed, is the axis of the whole. Made at the Ina-GRM with the Syter system, it builds every variation from three sources: the Étude aux objets, Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame, and a nod to Pierre Henry and his door, linking the Ars Nova to Schaeffer’s “new music”. Objets retrouvés (1996), written in memory of Schaeffer, is a lament and funeral march in the form of an ornamented chorale, three contrapuntal voices embroidering the long values of the original. AvatArsSon (1998), a commission from the French Ministry of Culture and Ina-GRM, is dedicated to “the inventors of the treasure”, from Bayle and Parmegiani to Stockhausen and Xenakis; it won 1st prize at the Pierre Schaeffer competition in Pescara. Phonurgie (1998), commissioned by the DAAD for Inventionen ’98 in Berlin and dedicated to Inés Wickmann, who also made the cover, lets the quotations fade so that the grown child can show its own identity. It won first prizes at CIMESP in São Paulo and Ciber@RT in Valencia in 1999.

Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont studied with Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger, and in the late 1940s discovered with magnetic wire what Schaeffer would later name musique concrète. Since 1963 he has composed only for fixed media.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0158, 2001.