Francis Dhomont

Le Cri du Choucas is a single 70-minute work by Francis Dhomont, conceived in 1997, left to mature and completed in 2014-15 in his studio in Avignon. It is the third and final part of his Cycle des profondeurs, after Sous le regard d’un soleil noir and Forêt profonde, a triptych of about three hours of what Michel Chion called “electroacoustic melodramas”, each guided by a psychoanalytic reading. Here the guide is the critic and psychoanalyst Marthe Robert and her essay As Lonely as Franz Kafka.

The title refers to the jackdaw, kavka in Czech, which Hermann Kafka used on his shop sign, and to his son’s line “I am a jackdaw”. Before the Law, from The Trial, runs through the piece as a red thread: a door open to one man and forbidden to him at the same time. Other themes are guilt, the father, solitude, dreams, impossible messages and death, with excerpts from The Penal Colony, Letter to His Father, The Verdict, the diaries, The Burrow and The Metamorphosis, which Dhomont translated anew into French. The work is dedicated “to my father (the one Franz did not have)”.

The musical material draws on four earlier Études pour Kafka, reassembled with new elements to fit a script for many voices, among them Marthe Forget, Pierre Louet, Hans Tutschku, Annette Vande Gorne and Marthe Robert herself; a few reminders of the earlier parts of the cycle return. Commissioned by Musiques & Recherches, it premiered at L’Espace du son in Brussels on 15 October 2014.

Born in Paris in 1926, Dhomont studied with Charles Koechlin and Nadia Boulanger and experimented with magnetic wire recording in the late 1940s. Since 1963 he has composed only for fixed media.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 16138, 2016.