Francis Dhomont

Études pour Kafka brings together three acousmatic works that Francis Dhomont composed in his Avignon studio in 2005-06 as preliminary studies for Le cri du Choucas, a long piece on the world and character of Franz Kafka that he had been working on for twelve years. As with earlier projects such as Forêt profonde, the studies grew beyond sketches into finished compositions, guided by the analysis of Kafka by Marthe Robert in Seul, comme Franz Kafka. The disc won the Prix Opus 2009-10 for record of the year.

Brief an den Vater, commissioned by the ZKM in Karlsruhe and premiered there in February 2005, takes a few sentences from the letter Kafka wrote to his father in November 1919 and never sent, chosen because they sum up his grievances and the anxieties at the root of his writing. The narration is by the actor Martin Engler; most of the other sounds come from the voice of the German composer Hans Tutschku, sometimes as vocalizations, sometimes transformed into pure sound. Dhomont describes the result as a hybrid of music and Hörspiel, deliberately rough and unseductive.

Premières traces du Choucas, dedicated to Tutschku and co-commissioned by Réseaux and Musiques & Recherches, takes its title from “kavka”, Czech for jackdaw, the bird that adorned the shop of Kafka’s father; it won the public prize at CIMESP 2007 in São Paulo. À propos de K, premiered at an Ina-GRM concert for the composer’s 80th birthday at the Maison de Radio France in 2006, moves without text through guilt, the father, solitude, illness, the Law and the dreamlike processes of Kafka’s writing.

Born in Paris in 1926, Francis Dhomont studied with Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger. In the late 1940s he discovered on his own, with magnetic wire, what Pierre Schaeffer would later call musique concrète, and since 1963 he has composed only for fixed media. He taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996 and has lived in Avignon since 2004.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 09102, 2009.