Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux

Impulsion collects the electroacoustic music for tape of Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, five works made between 1970 and 1981 in Paris, Vancouver and Bourges. Only two tape pieces are missing, Chut (1969) and Bernavir (1970), which could not be found. The booklet texts are by Andra McCartney, who places the music in the story of a composer who explored the voice, worked across disciplines and reflected on the place of women composers in Québec.

Arksalalartôq, commissioned by the Ina-GRM and premiered in Les Halles in 1971, sets texts by the poets Noël Audet and Gilles Marsolais in an analogy with an Inuit vocal game, mostly played by women, made of sounds without meaning; one ten-second montage only worked once she played it backwards. Contrastances is a study in opposites built from little material. Moustières, commissioned by the GMEB, grew out of a stay at Moustiers-Sainte-Marie in Haute-Provence, its rock masses and the high-pitched silence of the mountains. Zones, realized at Simon Fraser University, fuses harpsichord, piano, organ and electronic keyboards into four zones of distinct character.

Constellation I (1981), dedicated to Françoise Barrière and Christian Clozier, follows the structure of her earlier Mandala I for five instrumentalists: nine contrasting moments held together in a large gravitational movement. A dance version was choreographed by Martine Époque at Banff in 1983; the concert version is heard here.

Born in Notre-Dame-de-la-Doré in 1938, Coulombe Saint-Marcoux studied with Claude Champagne and Clermont Pépin, and in 1967 became the first woman to win the Prix d’Europe in composition. On the advice of Iannis Xenakis she went to the GRM in Paris, then taught at the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal from 1971 until her death in 1985, at 46.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0159, 2001.