Yves Beaupré

Humeur de Facteur is a cycle in six movements by Yves Beaupré, conceived as an “ordre” in the manner of François Couperin: each section has its own character, yet each is an integral part of the whole. Beaupré builds harpsichords, and the album opens with a line from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being about the longing to fall.

The project grew over a long time in his harpsichord-building shop. Working on an instrument, Beaupré heard the case and the soundboard answer every touch of a tool, a marking gauge, a loose string or a brass tack with a deep, musical resonance, so that the harpsichord under construction was already giving him smaller instruments of its own. He set up a tape recorder and microphones, ran the table saw and the sabre saw, and came away with six hours of tape.

That raw material was then cut, re-cut and remodelled in the studio, where, as he notes, the equalizer cuts no finger and the pitch shift leaves no splinter. A more recent knowledge of the sea also found its way into the result: halyards clattering against the mast, sails in fifths, the harpsichord’s quills running up the octave.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0160, 2001.