Francis Dhomont

Forêt Profonde is a 58-minute acousmatic melodrama by Francis Dhomont, based on Bruno Bettelheim’s essay The Uses of Enchantment on the meaning of fairy tales. It is the second part of his Cycle des profondeurs, works inspired by psychoanalytic thought, after Sous le regard d’un soleil noir (1979-81, 83), which drew on RD Laing. Dhomont describes it as an adult reading of children’s tales, moving between the memory of naive wonder and the discovery of their hidden mechanisms, to be heard on three levels: narrative, symbolic and musical.

The piece accompanied him for fifteen years. Two earlier versions of 36 and 37 minutes premiered in 1994 at Radio France and in 1995 at the Futura festival in Crest; this third and final version, almost twice as long and more than two years in the making, was first performed in Montréal on June 8, 1996. Commissioned by the French State and the Ina-GRM, it was realized in Dhomont’s Montréal studio, with most materials and treatments obtained on the Syter system at the GRM.

Forêt profonde is in thirteen sections: six “Rooms” with little or no text act as secret passages between seven thematic sections, from À l’orée du conte and La muraille d’épines to Fantasme, mode d’emploi. Each borrows an element, a colour or an atmosphere from one of the thirteen pieces of Schumann’s Kinderszenen. The work is dedicated to the composer’s mother and includes a Colombian recording offered by Inés Wickmann Jaramillo and a short excerpt from Beatriz Ferreyra’s Petit Poucet magazine. It won the Sacem Prix de Printemps for best electroacoustic work in 2007.

Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont studied with Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger and in the late 1940s discovered on magnetic wire what Schaeffer would call musique concrète. From 1963 he worked only with fixed media, and he taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996. He died in Avignon in 2023.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9634, 1996.