Bernard Fort

Lumière dans la Nuit gathers three works by Bernard Fort spanning ten years, from L’impatience des limites (1992-93) to Silence radieux (2000-02). All three were commissioned by the Ina-GRM and premiered in the Salle Olivier Messiaen of the Maison de Radio France, a room Fort calls a temple of acousmatic creation. The years in between were spent on ornithology, teaching, concerts and music for young audiences, and the boundary between abstraction and figuration, the natural and the cultural, runs through the whole disc.

L’impatience des limites, dedicated to Mady, began as a reflection on time and became, after her sudden death, a piece about memory as the proof of time passing. It won 2nd prize for tape music at Bourges in 1993. La paix de l’entendre, dedicated to Philippe Leroux and to François Bayle, develops a panoramic recording made from a small boat in the middle of a lake in the Danube Delta at sunrise, during a Villa Médicis Hors les Murs stay in Romania: night herons fishing, great cormorants, little egret, spotted redshank, coots, and a flock of greylag geese for the end credits. Fort slows the scene down to explore its depth.

Silence radieux, dedicated to his children, is built from a long walk recorded on a quiet snow-covered mountain, where the regular footsteps give both a tempo and the specific matter of crunching snow; the same route recorded in summer brings birdsong and insects. Abstract sounds made on the Syter system at the GRM take over whenever the walk stops.

Born in Lyon in 1954, Fort studied musicology and co-founded the Groupe musiques vivantes de Lyon in 1976. He taught electroacoustic music at the Université Lumière Lyon 2 and, since 1982, acousmatic composition at the École nationale de musique in Villeurbanne.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0371, 2003.