Patrick Ascione

Polyphonie-Polychrome is the acousmatic triptych that Patrick Ascione composed for concert between 1984 and 1989, all three parts commissioned by the Ina-GRM and premiered in its Cycle acousmatique series at the Maison de Radio France. For this recording the concert order was changed, and Sur champ d'azur and Valeurs d'ombre were adapted in January 1994. Jean Schwarz produced the master tape.

Ascione's starting point is a parallel between acousmatic music and painting: sounds shaped one by one, combined, erased, replaced and finally fixed on tape, as a painter lays colours on canvas, with no code between intention and object. Lune noire (1987-89), dedicated to Évelyne, takes its subject from astrology, two near-equal parts on transmutation towards disintegration and towards freedom, joined by a short Thème de Lilith. Sur champ d'azur, first made at the GMEB in Bourges in 1984 and fully revised in 1986, moves like the sky between storm and calm, through movements such as Un ciel de Van Gogh. Valeurs d'ombre (1986), dedicated to his parents, explores the dark end of the electroacoustic palette as a slow search for light.

In his preface Michel Chion credits Ascione with first formulating the idea of electroacoustic music as painting in sound, which led Chion to his own notion of “fixed sounds”, and calls the disc an event. Ascione thanks François Bayle, Christian Zanési and Francis Dhomont.

Born in Paris in 1953, Ascione trained at the GMEB from 1977 to 1979 and worked there until 1984. He later developed a “spatial polyphony” in works such as Espaces-paradoxes, his first piece on 16 real tracks, and taught in Cherbourg and La Rochelle. He died in Calvados in 2014.

CD in jewel case, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 9522, 1995.