Francis Dhomont

Les Dérives du Signe gathers four stereo works for fixed medium that Francis Dhomont composed between 1986 and 1991. Under the title Mouvances~Métaphores he had united seven pieces around movement, real or metaphorical, and these four form its second part, first issued by empreintes DIGITALes in 1991 and presented here on a single disc. Each plays with a kind of diversion: of musical discourse in Novars, of sound sources in Chiaroscuro, of the senses in Météores, of nature in Signé Dionysos.

Novars, commissioned by the Ina-GRM and realized partly in its Studio 123 with the Syter system, salutes the birth of musique concrète. Its only materials are fragments of Pierre Schaeffer’s Étude aux objets, Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame and a nod to Pierre Henry’s famous door. Chiaroscuro, dedicated to François Bayle, is “trompe l’oreille” music built on ambiguity between the spoken and the suggested, with borrowings from composers of the Montréal series Les Événements du Neuf; it won the Magisterium prize at Bourges in 1988. Météores is the presto finale of Chroniques de la lumière, a sonic daydream of light after a concept by the visual artist Luc Courchesne.

Signé Dionysos began with a 1984 commission from Jean-Étienne Marie of the CIRM in Nice for a parodic lakeshore opera in which every role, from the diva to the choir, goes to frogs. Most of the sounds were recorded at night in May and June 1984 and 1985 at a small lake in the Alpilles, near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and the definitive version dates from 1991.

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. Since 1963 he has worked only with fixed media, and he taught at the Université de Montréal from 1980 to 1996.

CD in Opak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9608, 1996.