Stéphane Roy

Migrations gathers three works that Stéphane Roy composed between 1998 and 2003, each in three parts. He describes them as stops along a migration: five years spent in the American Midwest, in St Louis, Missouri, and the return to Montréal. The album was a finalist for the Prix Opus 2003-04 album of the year.

Appartenances (2003), the most recent piece, celebrates the homecoming. After years in what he calls a conservative America, Roy rediscovered the ethnic diversity of Montréal and recorded it on walks through the city, then shaped those recordings in the studio towards abstraction while keeping a Celtic, Latin or Oriental aura, the names of its three sections. Excerpts from Joachim du Bellay’s Heureux qui comme Ulysse… and Charles Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage are read by Tzu Ying Hwong and Claudine Jomphe. It was commissioned by Réseaux des arts médiatiques.

Trois petites histoires concrètes (1998), his first piece made in St Louis, marks the 50th anniversary of musique concrète and is dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer; its three short movements deal with acousmatic listening, close-miked recording and the spread of loudspeakers into an orchestra. Masques et parades (2000-03) takes the circus as its model, moving from the euphoric Exultation to the grotesque Burlesque and to Noir silence, inspired by the trapeze, with the composer’s own texts recited by Jomphe and Roy.

Born in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Québec, in 1959, Roy holds a doctorate in electroacoustic composition and a PhD in musicology from the Université de Montréal. His 2003 book on the analysis of electroacoustic music won the Prix Opus for book of the year.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 0373, 2003.