Robert Normandeau

Figures is a reissue of Robert Normandeau’s album of four works composed between 1995 and 1999, which won the Prix Opus for album of the year in 1998-99; the composer’s notes are dated May 1999. The title plays on several meanings of the French word: the body, the human face, and the figure that stands out from its background, the sound or family of sounds that marks a piece. Each work is dedicated to someone Normandeau saw as its ideal listener.

Le renard et la rose (1995) comes from music written for a Radio-Canada adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, produced by Odile Magnan, and from the voices of its actors, among them Jacques Languirand and Jean-Louis Millette. Third in a cycle built only on onomatopoeia, it was commissioned by The Banff Centre for ICMC ’95 and won the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica 1996. Figures de rhétorique (1997), for pianist Jacques Drouin, uses only sounds of the piano, partly processed on SYTER at the GRM in Paris; the score came last, after the tape, and the work took first prize for mixed music at Musica Nova 1998 in Prague.

Venture (1996-98) is made only of fragments of 1960s and 1970s rock, its title taken from The Ventures, with quotations from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, the piece that led the composer from rock to classical music through Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Ellipse (1997-99) is the solo tape version of a work commissioned by guitarist Arturo Parra, whose mixed version is called L’envers du temps.

Born in Quebec City in 1955, Normandeau completed the first DMus in electroacoustic composition at the Université de Montréal in 1992, under Marcelle Deschênes and Francis Dhomont, and has taught there since 1999. He describes his music as a cinema for the ear.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0944, 2009.